Curse

Thornblade · Jun 16, 2011, 06:44 PM // 18:44

trying this against stone summit outside of yaks in hm, i think it should work but it doesnt seem to ...

me : A/R enraged lunge dagger spike with YMLAD
( OwJjYpd64SCQMM7P2kyS6P8g0GA )
kahmu : D/P VoS multi hit damage guy with fall back
( OgmkYep6qymD3fAzd3xi7vt5dcD )
meloni : D/Mo AoB condition spread / spike with hex remove
( OgOk8Up6qyqzzV6edzuaX3r4GqB )
livia : N/rt barbs / mop with resto
( OAhjYkHZITWblBWCSTTOUbciVVA )
olias : N/mo Ootv / mark of fury with prot
( OANEQsl985QJGaQVoWAZlM9rHA )
master of whispers : N/rt generic xinraes 'main healer'
( OAhiYwhMZtJNN5I8UVxJStdxAA )

The main problem im seeing is heroes are dying occasionally ( but more frequently then is normal ) for seemingly random reasons e.g. fighting 3 standard ice golems and olias dies in the backline ( no hammer wars or anything on him ) I am usually testing this on the mob next to the bridge on the eastern most path, which usually contains 7 enemies, often im dying during the first 5 seconds of the battle, ( empathy is not causing that ) . I have tried several variants on the build e.g swapping the main healer to a HB monk, swapping the barbs resto secondary to prot with shield of regen elite, thus having a tonne of prot skills around. My heroes have all got sensible insignias except melonni.

In theory should this setup actually work ? is it some special property of the stone summit, they dont seem that tough and i suspect my standard 5 hero team would defeat them ( its spirits, minions, dom, prot, smite, resto based ) I know the melee ai is bad but could that really cause this sort of 'defensive' problems ?

Vladimir94 · Jun 16, 2011, 07:39 PM // 19:39

It seems in theory this build should work, but you said yourself it does not. That being said here are some ideas:
1) You have 2 copies of rejuvination and recovery on your 2 resto healers. Spirits dont stack, so if you plan on keeping resto healers, get rid of the copy.
2) I'm really not sure how you are dying considering that for a 6 man zone you actually have a whole lot of healing and protting! I dont even use that much for 8 man zones (I usually just take 1 monk and an ST rit). You have 2 resto healers and a prot halfbar, but you said your heros can seem to stay alive. This should never happen. Personally im not a fan of /rt healers, so i would just change to a monk. You should only need to take a monk healer, with the prot halfbar on the order necro to stay alive in a 6 man zone.
3) The 2 dervish builds seem fine, however melee hero AI is terrible, which could be a source of problems.

Hopefully this helps! Also what you said was your standard 5 man team seems better. Having mesmers + MM + spirits will typically roll through anything.

Thornblade · Jun 16, 2011, 10:23 PM // 22:23

The overlapping spirits was a legacy from when i tried HB as the main healer, Ill probably try hb again just to make sure, he had energy issues the last time.

I amended the barbs resto by putting life and spirit transfer then set out looking for an area which i had already VQed and considered to be average and doesnt require special measures to tackle, i eventually chose the sage lands, went for a little stroll, went ok for a while then i got into a clump of trees and was fighting some spiders, breezed through them, was just finishing the last one or two when i looked behind and saw that 3 marrow spider things had popped up and some how killed olias !

Those things can do like 70 health steal each thats ... 210 in about a second, olias max health is 490 and he had no dp at the time, i suppose its possible that the spirits were all dead for some reason, meaning spirit transfer would not be usable to counter the spike, but still mend body and soul should be able to do it especially if olias is kiting after the first hp loss.

its this sort of thing which makes me think hang on should we really have taken a death there ( sometimes on my normal team i could pull way too much and stay clean ) .

**Marty Silverblade** · Jun 16, 2011, 10:42 PM // 22:42

*Why A/R? A standard WotA or MS build would produce more damage and is probably a bit tougher due to critical agility.
*Avatar of Balthazar changes the damage type to holy. All physical buffs like Barbs, MoP, OotV, and possibly any others I missed will have no effect on the AoB derv.

Thornblade · Jun 16, 2011, 11:10 PM // 23:10

Thats an excellent point about the balthazar avatar, i dont know that much about dervish i just choose it becuase it looks cool. im going to run into the same issue with the staggering force / dust cloak etc. The A/R is becuase ive not tried it before and i also though it would be good to have the pet also hitting to trigger barbs and i could also use other buffs onto the pet like soh, its true that it has little defensive or utility options compared to the more common builds, at the same time i could put unstoppable instead of YMLAD for more reslience, im wondering if the issue is something to do with having 3 'tanks' with not much defensive abilities, and the prot being spread out too thinly, but i also wonder if its the nature of the backline which is the issue ( you could have 3 sf sins but if the healer takes all the aggro it wouldnt matter ).

Anaraky · Jun 16, 2011, 11:59 PM // 23:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thornblade

Thats an excellent point about the balthazar avatar, i dont know that much about dervish i just choose it becuase it looks cool. im going to run into the same issue with the staggering force / dust cloak etc. The A/R is becuase ive not tried it before and i also though it would be good to have the pet also hitting to trigger barbs and i could also use other buffs onto the pet like soh, its true that it has little defensive or utility options compared to the more common builds, at the same time i could put unstoppable instead of YMLAD for more reslience, im wondering if the issue is something to do with having 3 'tanks' with not much defensive abilities, and the prot being spread out too thinly, but i also wonder if its the nature of the backline which is the issue ( you could have 3 sf sins but if the healer takes all the aggro it wouldnt matter ).

There are two things that instantly springs to mind.

1) Your prot setup isn't that great. Olias won't have that much time to cast Prot Spirit mainly due to how high maintenance cast-time wise OotV is. Xinraes reduction is a nice bonus but not really reliable. This can be somewhat remedied by microing PS.

2) If mobs circumvent the frontline your backline is helpless. A standard setup usually have at least two of the following: spirits, minions, casters with crowd-control. Both spirits and minions take a great deal of pressure of the backline due to taking aggro, pretty self explanatory. Casters with crowd-control refers to casters that can inflict Weakness, Blindness, interrupt etc. Your casters are either redbarring or offensive support. They have no way of stopping the monsters to do whatever they want, especially considering you have few spirits and have no minions.

In short, you lack proper protection and miss out from the "hidden" defensive benefits a lot of skills have that at first seem offensive in nature.

Thornblade · Jun 17, 2011, 11:51 AM // 11:51

I sorted the second dervish out last night, had to try and put some thought into it, tried onslaught first but noticed melonni was not recognizing it as an IMS and was also using it as a teardown instead of the skills i gave her for that purpose, i quickly realized the dervish ai is not great, I knew kahmu was working ok so I tried to figure out why ... He doesn't rely on teardowns and his attack skills don't remove his enchantments, then i considered the AoB dervish ( mostly teardown based ), it doesn't have any buff type enchantments that need to stay up, I would guess this is a problem anytime somebody tries to make a build for dervish heroes, you either use no teardowns or have no enchantments which are supposed to stay up, as an extreme example I think I saw melonni activate vow of piety and use it as a teardown despite balthazars rage being recharged .

After making a foolproof looking bar and changing the order of some of the other heroes skills to ' prioritize ' them ( not sure if this is superstition or not ) i tried it again and it in general the team seemed a bit stronger, but not up to my expectations still.

I think the prot / OoTV issue is more to do with order itself then anything, I think its better using prot then say healing because they are both timing critical but it should take less time to put on the occasional 1/4 prot then to keep putting out spirit lights, with the exception of aegis but thats got a long recharge. So i think thats a flaw with orders in general, but they are quite central to my offensive strategy, it wouldnt be the same team without it, I tried to think of work arounds for the casting time, e.g. strength of honor with hex removal but decided it would mostly increase offense and not be as valuable as prot, I also thought about using shouts which are energy based, probably in the command attribute, im not a paragon expert but I couldn't think of much which could replace half a bar of prot and hex removal.

Based on the 'hidden defense' idea I tried to see how I could work that into the team without losing all the important parts, didn't have any great ideas so i just forced SoS onto the barbs setup, didn't expect great results because it removed a lot of the healing specialization, but it actually seems to have made this team viable ( I vqed the area and only wiped at a group of around 10 with a necro boss ) melonni was on 60% dp by that point though, she is the 'weak link' at this point, not runed properly and has 435 hp and no armor bonuses except mysticism. So usually now its just her going down when theres enough pressure, in contrast to the original setup where it was more spread out through the team.

New builds after 'improvements' :
A/R
http://www.gwpvx.com/Special:PvXDecode?title=Special%3APvXDecode&wpBuil d=OwJjYpd64SCQMM7P0kyS6P8g0GAName=&Go=Submit+Query
D/P
http://www.gwpvx.com/Special:PvXDecode?title=Special%3APvXDecode&wpBuil d=OgmkYep6qymD3fAze3xi7vt5dcD&wpName=&Go=Submit+Qu ery
D/Mo
http://www.gwpvx.com/Special:PvXDecode?title=Special%3APvXDecode&wpBuil d=OgOk8UpqqyqkF4AGUD2l9lY421zF&wpName=&Go=Submit+Q uery
N/mo
http://www.gwpvx.com/Special:PvXDecode?title=Special%3APvXDecode&wpBuil d=OANEQsl985QJGaQ1pfAZl8SqHA&wpName=&Go=Submit+Que ry
N/rt sos
http://www.gwpvx.com/Special:PvXDecode?title=Special%3APvXDecode&wpBuil d=OAhkYcHZoKqz1scWNLDWiJn0sqC&wpName=&Go=Submit+Qu ery

Not sure whether those raw templates turned into links automatically or whether somebody had to fix it so i made the links manually.

The only trouble i can forsee with this is flexilbity particurly if they have heavy blocking, blind, anti melee etc, since theres no enchantment removal, rigor mortis at the moment, my bar could be adapted to deal with that situation though. I also might try to make it work with 2 avatar dervishes but i would need to find a reliable replacement for the orders, that could actually result in a more resilient team though.

Im glad this kind of works now because I noticed that i pretty much always use the same type of strategy for pve nowadays, which means i dont use most of the skills of my class, I noticed EFGjack has some nice guides on alternative hero strategies im going to look at those too.
Thanks for the support everybody.

aspi · Jun 17, 2011, 12:28 PM // 12:28

change your own char to this and there should be no problem in any part of the game.
OwFi0xjM9W6wwwcwEnp/QTGDC

Daesu · Jun 17, 2011, 02:26 PM // 14:26

There are a few issues with that build.

1. From what I have seen, heroes don't use Pious Renewal well. The best avatar based build for heroes that I know of, tend to be those based around Dwayna for the healing.

2. Melee AI is limited as you already know.

3. Your team build in your first post has 2 Recovery. It is not a good idea to bring 2 copies of the same spirit as one would override and replace the other but I think you fixed that in your later build.

4. Not a good idea to make your orders guy as the prot guy. Orders last for 5s, so if you want your orders to be refreshed frequently, you want to equip the rest of his bar with skills that either have long recharges or would not need him to cast often. Prots are important in HM and you want your hero to be free to activate them at the moment when they are needed, not competing for cast time with orders, unless you want to micro them yourself. Yes, I am referring to PS.

5. SoA is more useful than Shielding hands for supporting melee.

6. You have no splinter weapon to support your melee.

7. I suggest you replace your SoS N/Rt with a primary rit hero to get level 14 channeling and move his necro skills to another necro.

8. You have no Strength of Honor, which is a great skill to support your melee.

9. Not worth bringing painful bond with only 4 spirits in the team.

Anaraky · Jun 17, 2011, 04:26 PM // 16:26

You could always make one dervish into a Dwaynas support, to compensate you could drop the second necro healer thus freeing up a slot for utility. A Channeling rit with either Smiting prayers or Curses secondary would probably be a good choice IMO.

Glad it seems to be working out for you.

Thornblade · Jun 17, 2011, 06:28 PM // 18:28

I typically use SoH and splinter, wanted to do it different this time, I feel that the orders / barbs makes up for lack of soh,
plus I usually just have 1 physical, but for here there are 4 ( although the pet doesnt benefit from everything ).
Im using sand shards and mark of pain to replace splinter really, splinter could certainly swap for painful bond but it might be wasting energy if the ai uses it badly, as in 6 man and with heros on frontline its less likely that the splinter will deliver its payload fully, also i like painful bond a lot because it effectively doubles the spirits damage and has a good duration and affects multiple targets so it should be in effect most of the time.

I usually value soa but i was trying not to put too many 1 second + spells on that bar,
also i think *if* the aggro is spread out more then soa wont have its normal efficiency.

I tried acting on Point 4 by putting the prot on the SoS and putting the barbs / mop / rip onto the orders, didn't work because
1) only 1 healer remaining 2) taking too long to put up all the hexes and orders, making the spikes slower.

Point 7 is good advice, I managed to switch things around so that the main healer has barbs and mop, changed the SoS into a primary, same heals and the skill remove hex, I first thought it would reduce the healing ( putting things onto the main healer ) but it doesnt because the SoS healer is now more free ( less casting time burden ) and also has more sensible attributes, the main healer just loses some soul reaping, he had 'too much' anyway,
The team should actually be even stronger now

Daesu · Jun 18, 2011, 01:54 AM // 01:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thornblade

I typically use SoH and splinter, wanted to do it different this time, I feel that the orders / barbs makes up for lack of soh,
plus I usually just have 1 physical, but for here there are 4 ( although the pet doesnt benefit from everything ).
Im using sand shards and mark of pain to replace splinter really, splinter could certainly swap for painful bond but it might be wasting energy if the ai uses it badly, as in 6 man and with heros on frontline its less likely that the splinter will deliver its payload fully, also i like painful bond a lot because it effectively doubles the spirits damage and has a good duration and affects multiple targets so it should be in effect most of the time.

Personally, I don't really like to bring barbs even on my physical damage characters. It is a 10e spell, that takes 2s to cast, and only affects 1 target. It can be useful if you are fighting a tough boss, but not so useful in general pve.

You can always have Orders, SoH and Splinter working together. You don't need to keep casting SoH and Splinter for each target, unlike barbs.

Unless you micro Mark of Pain, heroes usually choose poor targets for MoP and they dont use it well on their own.

Painful Bond costs 15e per cast and heroes don't always choose the best target to use it against. With more spirits it could be worth it, since spirits dont always attack the right target that is hexed with it.

Thornblade · Jun 18, 2011, 01:05 PM // 13:05

Ah ok i see, I haven't payed much attention to spirit targetting and painful, I know spirits like to shoot in different directions sometime though, though i don't know what causes that and the rules by which they decide their targets, or whether it takes into account the presence of that hex on a possible target, also i suppose it would depend on the heroes targetting behaviour compared to the spirits. If your right and they are very bad at coinciding then it makes sense that you would possibly only want to use it alongside an sogm rit for example, when i picked the skill it was based on them hitting a hexed target everytime and thus and additonal 80 or so damage per attack cycle, but if they arn't accurate that assumption isnt valid and it may provide half that damage, splinter i know can do thousands of damage in one application in the right situation even in 6 man.

I started looking into the dual avatar supported by SoH, ive noticed that the dervish skill usage AI is terrible, really really bad, they can't tell the difference between a dervish and a monk enchantment, meaning they will use skills like Twin moon sweep without a dervish enchantment, they also seem to have no information about what skills should be used as a teardown and which are very strong long duration defense skills, and thus will waste them and leave long duration teardowns such as aura of thorns intact.

Pious Fury they will use without having any enchantments at all, the same applies to Pious assault. Using fleeting stability on a stationary target as a teardown, they also sometimes use these teardown attacks with no dervish enchantment, when a perfectly useful flash enchant is recharged, the list goes on and on, the question is can I make two builds which provide good damage and conditions without much overlap, which avoid all of these pitfalls ?

Im noticing that a LOT of strategies are viable in theory but they fall down when you try and put them into a form that heroes can handle, and thus how many interesting things you could do if you had a coordinated team of players.