Desert Nudity

[FoxBat]

A few of us have been trying to get some "elite farming" going in the off-times. Me and Drasca, with the help of Tanis on a nudist fire ele, actually managed to kill the Life Barrer boss right outside of Beacons. Even if we were hiding behind a wall the whole time.

So we have these elites authorized for use now:

Life Barrier
Warrior's Endurance
Ether Renewal

We should see if we can "capture" a few more.

Also a "doh" moment for strategy. Earth magic is causing most of our woes. Why not let Wyrm tank with Mantra?

[Seijin]

Seijin was absent (would've preferred to hear in advanace )

I never said I was back to being a full-time nudist.

Besides I had to work and then study for a midterm exam and pretty much forgot about anything else. :mad:

But I'm glad you missed me.

Okay, and since you want forewarning, I might not be able to make it next Tuesday as well...I have a few papers to finish and one might be put off until then.

[Lurker Wyrm]

So we have these elites authorized for use now:

Life Barrier

I thought the rule was only desert elites until after we ascend; did I miss something?

Earth magic is causing most of our woes. Why not let Wyrm tank with Mantra?

Not sure how that would work. At 0 armor you basically take 3x damage and reducing that by 45% (Mantra at 12 Insp.) really won't do much. You're better off sticking with Armor of Earth. Besides, Mantra tanking won't work with phys damage still being an issue in groups of 1 war and 2 eles. If we had a tank that was e/me, that would be a different story since then they could use both.

I'm going back to blood damage now that some of the spells I can use are so cheap, with enough in dom for Empathy. Backfire is pretty much useless because: a) it costs 15e, b) even at 12 dom it was barely able to keep up with Orison and a sub 50% WoH outhealed it, c) 10s duration means it catches 1 or 2 spells at most with the way the AI casts spells, d) it's only useful on monks and they're more readily dealt with with stuff like Arcane Conundrum (which lasts a lot longer and is also useful for arcanists) and interrupts. There's no hex removal in the desert so if one of the "rangers" brings d-shot it should be pretty easy to catch WoH. Orison isn't really anything to worry about since just about anything that's not a wand can out-pressure it.

Elona was more of a problem than it needed to be. People felt more rushed than neccessary and started moving faster than some others, meaning we weren't always together, which led to stupid mistakes that got us killed that could easily have been avoided.

[Zed-F]

That, and confusion over who was tanking, when everyone was ready for the tank to aggro the next batch, who was resing pets, which pets needed to be resed, etc. The fact that Hawk was not at her usual computer and so had lag issues, yet was also tanking, certainly didn't help. If we'd taken the time to think about it, Hawk and I ought to have switched roles due to her lag problems... but people didn't seem to like the idea of me being a backup tank, so I never specced for it.

Next time I'll volunteer to tank, and we'll try to do better organizationally and set a more controlled pace.

[FoxBat]

I thought the rule was only desert elites until after we ascend; did I miss something?

The "Spirit" of the rule was to stick to elites we could access. In the first iteration which focused on a "fixed developing team" variant, the restriction on elites was what we could manage to access and cap while naked (in prophecies). That's what I was trying to preserve with the newer pre-ascension rules; hence avoiding elites until we've killed the appropriate boss. It was never explicitly intended as a "desert-only" rule.

I don't think there's anything of much good in that spawn point, but you can cheese the randomly spawning treeboss from behind the wall and fight nothing if you're patient.

You're better off sticking with Armor of Earth.

*If* it's a full 12-earth spec. At the 40 armor Zed was running, that's about even damage reduction with Mantra. Mantra is also a major energy boost, which lets you churn out more mesmer shutdown on those problematic guys. I'm not as worried about the melee enemies. Still, it's not exactly a huge difference over the earth tank setup.

I'm going back to blood damage now that some of the spells I can use are so cheap

Very glad to see some blood on the team. Blood Ritual/Renewal is insanely cheap now. Our monks will love you for it.

Elona was more of a problem than it needed to be. People felt more rushed than neccessary and started moving faster than some others, meaning we weren't always together, which led to stupid mistakes that got us killed that could easily have been avoided.

It was a legitimate complaint that we spent too much time trying to revive dead pets, as well as some wasted time letting that first patrol by the wall run away out of range. On the other hand, trying to force people to move faster by Leeroying ahead always results in a dragging tail, which means death when patrols are around you. Moving at a decent pace is important in the timed section, but moving together is more important yet. Something like a "ready? set......GO" warning is therefore vital to keep everyone on the same page.

I'm thinking though that since the plan seems to be to come back to the fort with the first crystal rather than taking the back route, we're probably better off killing at least one group on the way out. Then there is less worry about aggro from behind, and less waiting for the "right opportunity" to streak across.

[Zed-F]

I'm thinking though that since the plan seems to be to come back to the fort with the first crystal rather than taking the back route, we're probably better off killing at least one group on the way out. Then there is less worry about aggro from behind, and less waiting for the "right opportunity" to streak across.

Yes. I think we agreed to that at the end of last session.

Anyone up for nudist captures this evening?

[FoxBat]

Anyone up for nudist captures this evening?

So me, zed, drasca, wb, vort, and special YoHo guest S T R Z, spent a bit of time in Elona Reach and found the elusive Wissper Issani. It took us about 10 minutes or so (!) to actually kill him. (I was playing mesmer. And yes I'm noob.) Yet in the end we prevailed, and our monks now have Word of Healing!

Just Marksman's Wager to go now.

[Zed-F]

Last night we managed to capture OOV (Elona), Marksman's Wager (Elona), and Defy Pain (Lornar's Pass.) We didn't have enough real nudists around so we used warrior heroes and robbed them of their weapons to simulate 20e 2pip-regen nudists. It went fairly well, as most of the time the monsters found the designated PC tank or a soft target first, though in wipe situations the high armour of the heroes did become noticeable. I wouldn't do it that way for a mission, but for captures it seemed to work acceptably -- and hopefully we'll be ascended relatively soon anyway.

So we have on tap:
Desert: Mantra of Recovery, Ether Renewal, Marksman's Wager, Word of Healing, Warrior's Endurance, OOV. (A full sweep)
Lornar's Pass: Life Barrier, Defy Pain.

There are a couple more skills we could try to get in Lornar's pass (including Offering of Blood) but it would involve fighting our way a fair ways through the zone and may not be worth it.

[Zed-F]

Today we tried Thirsty River.

Way tougher than Elona, it seems. The time limit for killing priests really hurts with our low damage builds. We tried several times and failed to kill even the first priest/mesmer boss combo. I really have, at this point, no idea how we're going to handle the double monk boss group. But hopefully we'll figure something out!

We were missing a second elementalist, or a mesmer, for extra damage on the spellcasters. Well there's always next time...

[Drasca]

The point of that exercise was to try out different things and work out the kinks. I believe it is do-able, but the activity must change.

Courin did great. With no direction, she held her head together.

Normal strategy if we have enough dps for everything:

Takeout patrols, takeout priest.

Emergency strategy, which we might need to apply:

Take out one patrol, possibly just make the champion of first patrol follow, group moves onward to takeout 2nd group Illusionist, tank / scatter / blind or disable champion somehow.

Inside base: Everyone clumps direclty next to the priest. Body block him. This makes grabbing aggro/scattering champions off Party as well. Body block the priest, local aoe scatters everything else, but Priest/boss is a goner. Being so tightly grouped makes touch range skills easier to use as well--which makes taking out illusionists more important early on.

I need to refamiliarize myself with Thirsty in depth.

Elona seems doable after thirsty, no?