Desert Nudity

[KingOfPain]

CHEERS!

*my birdie is all grown up. sob*

KoP

[Hawkmoon]

Hooray, hooray!

I don't think any of us are sorry to see the back of that mission!

Though as Fox put it, in his inimitable brand of optimism, "Thirsty River is gonna bring a whole new world o' hurt."

But that's to worry about next week!

Wyrm, I'm sorry to hear that you're not going to be joining us regularly any more. I hope you'll still be amenable to getting suckered in from time to time.

[Zed-F]

I think we're going to have to stick with the high-offense setup going forward in Thirsty River. We're going to continue to encounter forgotten priests and mesmers that we will need our own mesmer to help shut down. Dual MS + Mark works if the stars align, but dual MS + mesmer is better. That may mean we continue to forego dual monks, and rely more on damage prevention via ranger interrupts, daze, blind, and backup tanking, or perhaps we can make do without the ranger if we have dual monks. Having KoP bring blood ritual sounds near-mandatory, though.

If we do bring a ranger next time, concussion shot on aegis (priest) and on ethereal burden (illusionist) sounds like the order of the day, for the first group. Not sure what else we'll see after that. I do know we will see a LOT more enemy rangers with blind and daze (conc shot / dirt), plus crippling warriors, so I will have to try to fit antidote sig in my bar and/or we will have to try to fit some condition removal on the monk(s). Getting blinded while using Marksman's Wager is not fun if I don't notice it right away, and daze isn't pretty either. I can regain energy with Wager while dazed, or cast while blinded, but both at once makes me pretty useless.

[FoxBat]

So we were short on people and, given the difficulty of this mission, I wasn't going to force any round pegs into square holes. We really need some mesmerization to get past those priests. Those present all seem to be able to make it this friday; does this sound good for drasca + one other we need?

I looked in the mission itself, there are actually no monks aside from the shrine priests and that dreaded boss. Plenty of dead swords/hammers/bows, and nasty eles and necros though.

[FoxBat]

Maybe Drasca can post something to countermand this, but given his uncharacteristic absence for the past 2 days, I'm inclined to think he is busy with his navy life atm. We really need 2 others to supplement the regulars, especially someone with caster shutdown, to have a chance on this difficult mission.

[FoxBat]

Our five regulars showed up, and we managed to kidnap Ducus on a warrior tonight. Hopefully he will be returning next time as well.

Not quite a victory, but I do feel we made real progress. After many trials, we found a very effective way to handle this, at ducus' suggestion. Wait until the 1:30 mark or so, aggro *both* of the groups of one enemy team, clumping them nicely for AoE, then unleash the damage. We managed to kill both groups with a minute left on the clock, which was plenty of time to rush the priest. When the aggro and positioning was right, it was quite easy.

This tactic may work on all the other enemy groups, but it has to be executed carefully. Stray fire from eles is even more dangerous than from the mesmers as well.

One thing we also discovered: enemy teams will fight each other! I'm going to look into the feasability of having a tank run around with a run boost and try to peel the groups into fighting each other, while our team goes and assassinates the priests.

Anyway a good learning experience. We will crack this tough nut yet!

[WarBlade]

One thing we also discovered: enemy teams will fight each other!

Yeah, they've been doing that since Day #1 I think. I stumbled onto it purely by accident back before Heroes made life easier whilst trying to get one of my characters through. I never tested with the 3-team arena but in the second arena I couldn't quite get the snake casters properly involved. It was generally pretty easy to create a tangle of Champions in the middle, but the snakes mostly hung back and bombed them from the sidelines while I was really trying to get them to bomb each other. Then of course they all rez and it's back to square one.

I have some vague recollection of crippling attacks (Hamstring) sinking the plan a bit though, because of the way that skill gave me trouble when I tried to disengage. If you can ditch the condition and keep it off then you might have a good opportunity in the making for ganking the priest there.

[Zed-F]

More like rediscovered, than discovered, for some of us, but it's not a feature of the mission you see come into play often, since most folks try to avoid aggroing the rightmost group by staying left.

It's possible we could try a gank but I would be very concerned about aggro management in a that situation. Given the number of elementalists in the area, we would not want to get fallen upon from behind by the remnants of the first group (pull possible draw-in from the other team) while dealing with the priest and his bodyguards. Especially since making sure all enemies are focused on a single tank is fairly crucial for our monking situation. If our tank is running around kiting the two teams together it makes it harder for him to nail the positioning needed for good tanking.

[FoxBat]

The other day Me, Zed, and Courin got together to "practice" tanking this mission, along with two mindblasting adjacent-AoE fire eles, and Goren flagged way back for rebirth duties. It only took 4-5 hours and 20 candy canes or so to crack. But! we have found a strategy....

Basic idea is to aggro both groups per enemy team at once and wipe them before charging the priest. The devil is in the details.

First (mesmer boss) group we have down pretty well. Tank is best off running up once the group on the outer left is on the counterclockwise retreat north. Everyone needs to equip a bow on this one to prevent them from firing chaos storms.



Second (ele boss) group requires the tank to stand where I am, with players in the green spot to my rear left. This should catch the melee guys on the wall and sometimes a snake caster or two up on the ledge, just out of range our our midline. Between the two groups this is four melee and two arcanists; melee should easily nuke first, but beware scatter unless we have two showers going off.



Third (necro boss) group has a ton of very pesky rangers. But there is a dune-wall to be hide behind where I am standing, while the tank is up in the open. Everyone but the tank should equip wands here, to discourage the rangers from running in to throw dirt. (Not that we mind being blinded, but you *will* mind the point blank shots following). Having no weapon will not cut it, you need a wand here.



Fourth (warrior boss) group has a handful of rangers, which are again neutralized via the wall I'm behind. Tank will need to run up to get both group's attention and pull them to the spot courin is standing in.



Fifth (ranger boss) was the hardest group due to the ackward positioning. The first group patrols right outside the door, while the second one is *inside*. The method we eventually succeded with involved luring the outside group over to the sixth group, running out and letting them fight, then coming back around, pulling the inner group, killing them and then the priest. Problem is it's part luck shaking all the aggro on to the enemy team; I think there has to be a simpler way to do this, but there are 4 elementalists between the two groups who must have their earthquakes interrupted. One possibility may be to aggro the inner group through the wall, then wake up the second group and plant our tank in the door. We should be able to nuke the melee + 2 arcanists this way, then pull the last 2 arcanists out, then nail the priest.



Sixth group (monk) is full of rangers again. To neutralize them, the team waits behind the walls of the now-defeated fifth group, while the tank goes out and grabs both enemy groups and pulls them back to this location. Once all of them are dead, tank runs and gets the boss's attention, and lures him wanding just outside of the base. Then the tank waits around there, keeping the boss wanding her or someone else, while the team goes and kills the priest. As long as the boss is kept outside casting range of the priest, he won't heal the priest and that makes defeat manageable. Finishing off the boss himself can be time-consuming but between dual meteor showers and some mesmer harrasment, he will eventually fall.

Courin says she will be able to make it next week, and she's practiced this course rigorously, so I'm confident we can pull this off now. She has the timing down very well and doesn't need us rushing her or telling here when and where to go.

Some thoughts about build fine-tuning;

Possibly the most damaging thing a Blood Ritual necro can do is to power another offensive caster in need (probably mesmer depending on the bar, or eles after a long battle) Alternate ritual on monk and that caster then.

Barbed trap is probably a good addition to our ranger tank, but placed not in battle but before. Generally useful a little behind the tanking position, to catch any strays who run past the tank.

Also eruption, while expensive, can provide a little emergency protection,
but it should not be used on tanked groups as it will cause scatter.

A number of spots have us firing through walls, so minimizing the line-of-sight spells involved is probably best. While we may need fireball, phoenix can probably be replaced with incendiary bonds.

Given enough candy canes, hard rezes, quick retreats, and parking the ghostly far back, a mistake needn't require a mission restart. We must've near-wiped a ton of times trying to figure out this mission, but only restarted it once. I'd really prefer if we can get a rebirth on someone else in addition to the monk then.

Edit: fixxed for Zed

[Zed-F]

One possibility may be to aggro the inner group through the wall, then

Then what?

----

We do need at least 3 rebirths if we are running all PCs, I think. Getting away with 2 was only possible because Goren was constantly flagged far far back out of danger. A lot of those forgotten will give chase an AWFUL long way... right back into the previous fighting zone in many cases (e.g. from the area where we fight team 2/3 to the area where we fight team 1.) If we are running all PCs, we can't afford to have 1 person hanging back that far for safe rezing, and having only 2 hard rezes isn't enough to guarantee one of them will make it out of trouble.

Another thought we had was barbed trap is better against warriors, but dust trap may be more useful against rangers and be a potentially better counter than eruption. (This is still placed before hand on the way into the tanking spot, to help deal with leakers rather than to protect the tank.) OTOH, there's limited room on Courin's skillbar so we may have to be somewhat choosy about which problems we want her to prepare against.

Blood renewal is ok, but I think a blood ritual necro will need extra healing and/or a more spammable healing skill if constantly sacrificing for blood ritual. Warrior (heal sig), ranger (unguent), or monk (lots of choices) are all possible secondaries. The main idea would be to spend all the time buffing self and allies and not bother targeting enemies.