So good its cheating! (Limitless energy, constant damage, and fortress defense!)

Hi. I tried Gates of Madness, and, being stupid (it was my first time, and I didn't read the wiki guide or anything) I thought that the shrines made it HARDER to kill Shiro. My alliance told me as half my party wiped (3 people left, then 4, then 5) that you had to do the shrines. So I took one, and got owned at the Bowmaster 's for my 2nd go. This was after dying twice to Shiro's Impossible Odds/Battle Scars combination, which my shortbow Jin couldn't interrupt, 3 times in a row. I have everything exactly as posted, and was working insanely well during the mission. The lich went down with nobody going below 90% HP. I'm just wondering, what people speculate could have gone wrong, or what I could have done wrong before I entered the mission?

Even though this isn't mission help, I'd like to know if I'm using the build wrongly or something. Could Jin need to be set to aggressive, or something? She interrupted every "Call of the Torment" so fast that it didn't even get to register progress. Also, many of the paragon shouts seemed not to maintain as much during the end-mission. It was weird.

I've tried this setup and me and my wife were able to do the last part of the game (2 missions and the gates areas leading up to it) nicely, we got wiped once but that was due to a very unfortunate triple group aggro.

The only thing I noticed was that the ranger and Morgahn both used Stand your Ground right at the start instead of waiting for it go off which was a bit of a shame, so since I was playing Paragon I took that and gave my ranger a different skill, worked pretty good.

Thanks for the build, it made our life a lot easier

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holy crap i tried Gate of Madness for 4 hours with variuos partys and i read this did it with heroes and henches first try and got masters very nice!!!

Grate build excellent job really the only thing I noticed is that General Morgahn doesn’t use flurry on his own ?!!
~DA

I have a question. Which henchmen are people using to do Gates? >.> I can't seem to find a good combination after 3 tries of getting raped by Shiro.

Yeah! I will definetely try this tomorrow. Thanx author.

Heh too bad morghan doesn't join your group til pretty late.... roughly around the time where you're spending lots of time moving around in a wurm's gullet =b

Gates? Haven't gone back to try it with this combo yet, but when I finished it I used devona, mhenlo, khim and herta.

Great build - thanks a lot.

I do not have Restore Conditions yet (I just made it to the mission, while I have been playing since just about the beginning, all of my chars that made it that far never needed to cap the skill and have since been deleted and new ones made - I hate playing prot/heal monks so never any need to cap it) and have been using mend conditions - work's pretty good too. I will cap Restore Condition tomorrow on my Dervish.

I also didn't have Song of Restoration and had already taken the quests that cause Nightfallen Garden to be where you go. I used Aria of Restoration and it worked pretty good. I finally got someone to take me to the Garden of Seborhim (if you have the Nightfallen garden just get someone who has not taken those quests as the party leader - you can enter the mission. Then just have them map out or go along with you). I can tell a difference with the Song of Restoration so it is worth getting.

I only have two "complaints". One that I have is that we do not get the Paragon hero early enough. Though that was a basic complaint I had before seeing this (and pretty much my only real complaint with Nightfall - I really wanted access to more classes earlier. I have ten PvE characters and it would be nice to not have to take that long for each one). While not a complaint about this build per se (build is great - good work), I just wish I could use it for more of the story.

The next is that it doesn't mesh well with a few classes (and this is a very very minor one - it is so survivable that I do not really care). I have a hard time getting my dervish to really take advantage of it. I already had more than enough health and energy. Of course, it is a *good thing* to have this problem I suspect that when my ele finally gets the Paragon hero she will be very happy.

Very nice job. In my experience (henching the game) it is much more effective in Nightfall than end game Prophecies, which is backwards from nearly everything else in Nightfall (nothing wrong with that, just interesting). Mostly because the Prophecies henchies do not seem to be equipped to take advantage of near unlimited energy. Though while doing the Ring of Fire mission today they all got body blocked in one of the lava flows, only four henchies died By far the easiest time I have had in the game so far, it takes two mursaat towers effects overlapping to drain my parties energy, just one and I can still spam attack skills

Next up is factions, it will be interesting to see how well the healing goes against some of the ele bosses, though I have a hard time seeing much else work as well. It will be nice not to have to suffer DP because some boss can spam Meteor with double damage (or other ele skill that I can not spam due to having to wait for exhaustion to be undone, let alone double damage).

still, some required skills/elite skills are getting at end game. I wish OP could come up with replacements for those skills

OK, it's official, this build (or a variant of it, with 2 paragons) really rocks. I was able to do the "master" level quest "Breaking the Broken" (100 lightbringer points reward!) without having a single death in the party!

If you look at the guildwiki entry for this quest, most people were doing it with 60%DP and with Lightbringer Gaze (which I didn't even have at the time). Well, with a Paragon-buffed build like this, no more dying !
After that, I simply cleared the rest of Nightfallen Jahai with it, just grinding for my next Lightbringer rank.. It was flawless.
Great post - emphasizing the power of Paragons.

DAMN MISSION! I cannot manage to kill Shiro. I HATE THIS MISSION. My warrior will prolly never get thru this ADD-ON.

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try shiro with hex overload heroway... (1 mesmer, 2 necro)

I've beaten shiro&lich easily with that kind of build (heros & henchs only)

I tried this build...holy hell. It's fantastic. I notice some of you are having problems gathering all the skills. The way I did it was to Alliance Battle my way to 10k Balth faction, then unlock what I needed. Heroes have instant access to ALL unlocked skills.

This build rules, I'll say it again.

Ok, just did gates of madness (first real try - a while back I was goofing with some builds and never made it past the portals).

Very easy. I did finally bite the bullet and purchase the skills needed for my dervish to mesh with this build (dang, had enough for the end game armor, now I gotta go farm some a few more hours before beating the game. Plus I hope the skill balance doesn't make my plat wasted). I did, however, swap the archer out for a similar Koss build. Seemed to work just as well and having Wild Blow helped on Shiro. I made my Dervish a D/P added in Go For The Eyes and the paragon signet for hard rez. I took two heal henchies, devona, and whoever the archer was. Only death I had was the henchies kept aggroing Titans and I had to go AFK for a moment - the two hench healers ignored the flag and decided to wand 6 titans to death in a duo pair. I did miss the expert award, but only because I mis-undertood the requisites - I cleared the freaking shrines but didn't notice I had to stand around a bit and capture them - I understood it as killing the margonites was enough.

If anyone is interested Koss's build is pretty much what was posted on the page before this, just small differences:

warrior/paragon

strength: 9
axe:15
tactics:9
command:9

skills (in order on bar - top to bottom equals left to right, wild blow first on bar, rez sig last)

Wild blow - disabled until I want him to spam it otherwise it constantly drains all adrenaline. Very useful against shiro
cyclone axe
triple chop[e]
"Go for the Eyes"
Disrupting Chop
"Stand Your Ground"
Heal Sig
Rez Sig

With both Triple chop and cyclone axe being spammed (and with all the energy gain it is) lots and lots of enemies hit

Ok I tried giving a shortbow to jin, and man it works wonders since everyone is always in shout range, so I thank you for the suggestion. Also to Sidra who was having problem with th Gate Mission. Shiro should not be using impossible odds while you are capping the shrines. Do not attack shiro until the shrines are capped. Shiro only uses odds at 1/3 health and is harmless at full life. I think you died because you tried to damage shiro while taking the shrines at the same time, which is a big no no because the more you damage him the more he deals back. Keep him at full life and save him for last and you should have no problems.

~On another note, im glad to hear so many successes from the build! Keep up the pwnzerations and always feel welcome to add anything at all that can make the build better or more flexible.~

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For those of you having problems finding the skills, simply make a pvp character and do some RA battles for quick faction, you can get the missing skills you need unlocked for you heros in no time (:

i did last 2 missions with the build and got masters in both on my first try WOOOHOOO thx a mil
~DA

after failing gates of madness once, i put it off for 2 weeks and played my other characters. but this team set up got me masters on the last two missions. thanks a bunch.

some things i changed tho, i gave the ranger one more interrupt and dropped troll and dropped points from WS all together and put some into command.
and im not sure if my monk hero was using it but i gave him an inspiration interupt for some e-management. multi-tasking AI FTW!

I swaped the Inspired/Revealed Hex for a Gift of Health and set the attrabutes to 14 Prot, 10 Divine, 10 Healing, 8 Inspiration, and it seems to be working a bit better. Try it out

You made a mistake on the Mo/Me build. You can't use a minor inspiration rune.

My approach is more aggressive. I abuse the most powerful (PvE wise, that is) paragon skills like you do. But I don't see the point of using a monk hero. In my experience, it's a waste of resources. When you're zapping all types of monsters in a few seconds, there is no point in playing defensively. A couple of monk henchmen (and often *one* monk hench) is more than you need to keep everybody alive (a couple of rez signets will take care of your occasional mistake).

In short, my third hero is a blood necromancer with Order of the Vampire. With 4 or 5 physical damagers in the group (myself included), the raw damage output (see quote below) of a perma-OoV added to the disgusting Paragon goodies will melt anything you can find in this game.

Typical setup:
- Me (sword, strength, mindnumbing dragon slash)
- Paragon (motivation, sword, leadership)
- Necro (blood, soul reaping, motivation)
- Warrior/Paragon (for Wild blow & YAA, axe + command) or Ranger (barrage, command)

For Shiro, you might want to customize a couple of secondaries to strengthen your defense (wards, wells, aegis...), and for abbaddon you need a couple of group condition removal ([skill=text]Cautery Signet[/skill] or [skill=text]Martyr[/skill] or [skill=text]Extinguish[/skill]), + group speed buff ([skill=text]"Fall Back!"[/skill]). No need to cap the shrines nor to be particularly afraid of nasty bosses. Lastly, you don't need a MM in the group (too slow, no synergy with OoV and most paragon skills).

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