Desert Nudity

[Zed-F]

Yeah, though we haven't really come across the time crunch on Elona yet, since we have to date resigned first.

One thing that I don't think worked very well is the Mo/W with intent to cause damage with swords. Stance tank with WoH is one thing... but sword damage with a Mo/W with a starter weapon is a waste of time. Bringing an actual damage class would be better if we want damage.

Even Mo/W stance tank needs Prot Spirit, though. Might be better to have our monks worry about monking and bring another primary (W or E) if we want a tank. W primary makes a better tank in the face of interrupts/strips... though E primary seems likely to be able to bring more damage along in addition to tanking if interrupts/strips are not too bad.

[FoxBat]

Tanking in general is basically futile if we are going the "jump into the base" route. We need party-wide defense in that case. I'd say WY but I don't think we have the right character to use that, as mentioned stance tank isn't doing much. WoH + Life bond worked pretty well, but you need balth spirit to keep it up. Two monks doing that might be fairly solid. (although arcanists later in the mission are absolutely deadly, which is why I stopped using life bond.) Another might be a long-distance life barrier guy with divine healing and some random utility stuff. In hard parts this character just stays away, giving the whole team 50% damage reduction and occasional party heals. A WoH monk in the fray propped up by Blood Ritual spamming may be able to keep everyone alive.

Whatever way you slice it, the illusionists are the devestating part. As a monk I'd have enough energy to keep people surviving the warrior/ranger types if they weren't burning it constnatly.

[Drasca]

Bad news:

Laptop AC adapter failed. No access to my own computer until I can get a new one from Toshiba. I won't be able to make it tuesday. At least Elona's reach is easy...

Edit: Power back! I'm online!

[Zed-F]

Some interesting things to note if we have two monks able to bring a bond... potentially one of them might be a full bonder setup but the other only have a single bond up on the tank.

Weird Bonding

Having more than one monk cast Life Bond on the same party member offers no additional protection to that member (still receives half damage), but the redirected damage is split between the Bonders, and is THEN reduced. This significantly reduces the damage redirected to the bonders. It’s very doubtful that the additional Bonder compensates for the loss of another party slot. I've never done this, but perhaps this has some merit [1] when low-level bonders are adventuring in high-end explorable areas, or [2] when the party features a take-aggro tank who can be expected to take lots of spike damage which he can heal, and you don't want the bonder to die from the passive redirected damage and you want two monks deriving energy from the redirected damage.

Life Bond cast on the Bonder will not reduce the damage the Bonder takes from re-directed damage, since Life Bond reduces 'attack damage'. However, it still reduces direct attacks against the Bonder.

I look forward to testing a double-bonder party, where each bonder keeps Seed of Life running on her partner and take turns casting Aegis.

[Lurker Wyrm]

Sorry I missed last night. I was planning to make it but a bad headache and some lack of sleep kinda had other ideas.

[Zed-F]

'Sok, we found 6. Calis decided to give it a go with his warrior, though he's not used to tanking as a warrior. He's more used to running around and slaying everything in Ursan mode, with 1100+ HP. Despite that, we welcomed him in to give it a shot.

Unfortunately, after a try or two, he had to give up the computer, and we never really got going again after that. Took a while to round up Seijin and respec and get started, then Fox got dropped while we were in-mission and wasn't able to reconnect, so we called it a night.

Next time!

[FoxBat]

Yes, I had some very windy/frosty weather and a well-timed power outage.

One thing I'm finding at this point is the variant isn't a guest-friendly as I might have hoped, simply due to the sheer difficulty. The tank needs to have experience to know about optimally positioning themselves to distract the dangerous ranged casters we face, and I don't think a necro (or ele) monk can cut it without the Divine favor either. Third, stance tanks are just vastly inefficient compared to an ele speccing mildly in earth and the rest in fire damage.

I'm hoping things will even out slightly once we get away from time-critical missions, where we can rebirth from near-wipes all day long if needed.

[Zed-F]

I'm hoping things will even out slightly once we get away from time-critical missions, where we can rebirth from near-wipes all day long if needed.

Yes. Having access to a whole bunch more elites and non-core/proph skills will certainly help too.

[Lurker Wyrm]

Sorry, but my interest has pretty much dropped off. I might be around every now and then, but don't count on me for weekly participation anymore.

[FoxBat]

We had the usual suspects plus the lovely Courin on a ranger. Started off with two failues, then we tried something different- I had to try and solo monk while Drasca got on a mesmer with various interrupts and shutdown. I had both to keep Zed our earth tank bonded and heal the party, though KoP's blood ritual made that possible, and courin additionally harassed the casters with interrupt and daze. We took some extra deaths this way, but the enemies died quickly, and we just managed to run the second crystal with 2 minutes on the clock!!!

A cause for celebration!