Experimental Tombs

I have another thread going right now about what gimmick builds are, and how bp might be replaced.(nothing wrong with bp, but variety won't hurt in that area) Here are some possible options for Tombs.
So the first one one the menu will be an ele team. I am by no means an expert on these professions, so any input would be appreciated.

Powerhouse: Right now it looks like searing flames is a pretty good way to deal massive amounts of damage.

[skill=text]Aura of Restoration[/skill]
[skill=text]Fire Attunement[/skill]
[skill=text]Searing Flames[/skill]
[skill=text]Glowing Gaze[/skill]
[skill=text]Liquid Flame[/skill]
[skill=text]Glyph of Sacrifice[/skill]
[skill=text]Meteor Shower[/skill]
[skill=text]Resurrection Signet[/skill]

This is the build straight off wiki(couldn't get all the cards to work , so text will have to do.) Decent energy management from Glowing gaze, but I you could always switch out Glyph of Sacrifice for more(though the insta cast meteor shower is nice) The main thing to remember is that there will be 5 of these, so it may not need all these offensive abilities. If someone could recommend a tweak to add self defense, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Now we need someone to grab and control aggro, and we have several options in this experiment. A trapper/interrupter to help pull, a water ele for snares and slow downs, or the good old mm.
For the sake of keeping ele's in the mix, lets use the water ele. Another build straight off of wiki:
[ skill=text]Ice Spikes[/skill]
[skill=text]Shard Storm[/skill]
[skill=text]Deep Freeze[/skill]
[skill=text]Draw Conditions[/skill]
[skill=text]Heal Party[/skill]
[skill=text]Ether Prodigy[/skill]
[skill=text]Resurrection Signet[/skill]

This build leaves a blank space, so we've got tweaking room. Draw conditions should probably be replaced with a hex removal, and ressurection signet with a hard res. Since this build is e/mo, it can continue to double as backup healer. To use a different secondary would open up options: ranger would give access to traps and interrupts to help with pulling and aggro control, while mesmer would give slowdowns and hex removal.
Final Option: ignore your secondary except for res and take more aoe such as [skill=text]Grasping Earth[/skill] or [skill=text]Ward Against Foes[/skill] to toss at a choke point.

After that we don't have much more to discuss. We have 5 damage eles, a slowdown ele, and 2 slots open. We can go with the traditional approach and toss a minion master and a monk in, or we can go with a slightly different approach and toss in a Warder and a monk.
I couldn't find a build on wiki for this, but here's what I could cobble together.

[skill=text]Ward Against Melee[/skill]
[skill=text]Ward Against Harm[/skill]
[skill=text]Ward Against Foes[/skill]
[skill=text]Armor of Earth[/skill]
[skill=text]Kinetic Armor[/skill]
[skill=text]Sliver Armor[/skill]

Ward against elements could be used if you wished to cobble together Greater Conflagration and winter, giving you +24 armor against anything, but leaving you unable to use Rodgorts invocation. Energy management would of course be needed, and if you keep Kinetic armor you'll need a good spammable spell to allow you to wear it. Self-heal or res wouldn't hurt either.

That's all I've got for now(without repeating myself), hopefully some of you will be interested enough to correct my mistakes and build a better mousetrap.

But that's just my two cents

Please, whatever you are smoking, please let me have some
Don't know how many times you've been to tombs but spellcasters aren't too useful there.
1) Their squishy and the enimies their take a visceral pleasure in mutilating anything remotely squishy; wards might help but what if he dies or gets interrupted and with little self heal or defense for killers, not good.
2) Enchants are bad in tombs cause they can get shattered or rended.
3) Givin their squishyness factor, i dont think one monk is gonna be enough.
4) Theres this little skill they like to use in tombs call Finger of Chaos=FTL.
5) With the lack of self heal and the fact that res sig is useless after one use in tombs, a secondary monk might be good; rebirth is usually best but rebrith+ele= so maybe like res chant or restore life or sumthin.

So all in all, dont think its too good an idea, plus b/p would be so much faster than this. If it aint broke, dont fix it

Quote:

Umm...weird.

Whenever I used to play Tombs our group would look like this;

2 Monks
Minion Master
Blood Necro (Orders)
And the rest as BP Rangers

Perfect runs everytime with little to no trouble at all.

2 monks for b/p group? They must be really really bad.

I'm not sure if you need MS on all eles, It should be enough on 1 or 2 max. In any case you should be spamming SF & GG combo over and over. Well, I haven't run this in Tombs but a simmilar build worked very well with realm with torment.

Quote:

Glyph of concentration?
Honestly, this guy comes up with a new tombs idea and you guys are flaming him about how BP works. So? What if this works better. The damage output is amazing, has a bigger AoE than barrage, and you can bring they're on fire on a paragon. I can see this being faster than BP by far.

vampireX,

The biggest problem in Tombs for the Ele is lack of experience, not the squishisness, Fingers, or the Grasps. Up until Tombs opened up for pve, 95% of the Ele population was content to using Fire for every area in Tyria as it provided the most damage output, even though it offered the very least in ways of defense. The typical nuking build at the time involved long casting skills that were very prone to interruption, and combined with Fire's lack of defense, is why as a conclusion the Ele was unfit for the place in general.

Now that Ele's have had some buffs from recent updates, as well as quite a few skills added to their lineup, it may warrant another look to see what else could be done to take on Tombs. A b/p Ranger can pump out 39 dmg to up to 6 Grasps with Winnow up, plus dmg from your vamp, OoP/OoV, plus the damage from all your minion buddies every second. Now I know that that's a tough act to follow, but one Searing Flames Ele alternating SF and Glowing Gaze can pump around 60-65 DPS to that same Grasp, 40 DPS to his surrounding buddies, and cause burning to them all while he's doing it.

So think about it, if you've got say 5 Searing Flames Ele's dishing out the damage, put a Warder in for protection but utilizing the very powerful Sandstorm [E] for 49 dps for 10 seconds on the grasps in a very large AoE, a Deep Freezer Ele or hey,..how bout those poor mesmers you always see in Tombs now and again just wishing,..set them up with mantra of persistense and Shared Burden for the mass snare, and your standard b/p whoring WoH monk (who'll no doubt be like, 'Uhm,..what kinda group did you say this was again?'), and you've got a rough form of what just might rival the good old, but seriously dated, b/p build.

I can see now that for some areas in Tombs that the b/p will perform better, for instance in Scarred Earth, the room with the very large patrol. An experienced b/p can simply aggro the whole durn room, where this build would probably wipe and need to take it a bit easier. But I think that with the smaller groups that this build actually might dispense with with the baddies faster. I'd just have to find the people with all these skills and see.

I mean if you're content with farming Tombs as part of a b/p forever and ever, that's fine, but it really just puts me to sleep! If this experimental build rivals b/p with the ease of slicing through the place, well, it'll eventually put me to sleep too. But at least it won't be the same old b/p.

Sli Ander,

The GoS/MS thing may be useful for the Scythes in the backfield and could be carried by one or two of the nukers, but those guys will have to kite like a pro in there, but as for the rest of the standup nukes, they'll need to bring some form of self protect besides Aura of Restoration, even if they're standing in a neverending Ward/Melee. I could be wrong given the fact that I think the mobs will dissipate rather quickly with this build, but better safe than sorry. Initial testing might want to bring some form of armor buffs with the Fire Ele's, but then maybe not.

I still like Mantra of Flame for the additional protection it provides against the Dryders and Seige Wurms. With only 3 in Inspiration it negates 31% of Fire damage, easing the burden on the monk, the Mantra really helps when you reach the Dryder room in Scarred Earth, and all the areas afterward.

So, let's try this:

5 - Searing Flames E/Me's
Fire Magic -16
Energy Storage - all you've got left
Inspiration - the leftover

[skill=text]Searing Flames[/skill]
[skill=text]Glowing Gaze[/skill]
[skill=text]Liquid Flame[/skill]
[skill=text]Glyph of Lesser Energy[/skill]
[skill=text]Mantra of Flame[/skill]
[skill=text]Aura of Restoration[/skill]
[skill=text]Fire Attunement[/skill]
[skill=text]Resurrection Signet[/skill]

1 - Sandstorm Warder E/Me
Earth Magic - 16
Energy Storage - all you've got left
Inspiration - the leftover

[skill=text]Stone Daggers[/skill]
[skill=text]Obsidian Flame[/skill]
[skill=text]Sandstorm[/skill]
[skill=text]Ward Against Melee[/skill]
[skill=text]Armor of Earth[/skill]
[skill=text]Stone Striker[/skill]
[skill=text]Mantra of Earth[/skill]
[skill=text]Earth Attunement[/skill]

1 - Snaring Mesmer Me/?

[skill=text]Shared Burden[/skill]

An experienced Mesmer should fill in the rest, I'm not familiar enough with the newer mesmer skill lineup. There may be some room here in a Paragonian secondary for skills like [skill=text]Song of Power[/skill], [skill=text]Aria of Zeal[/skill], [skill=text]"Stand your Ground!"[/skill], or [skill=text]"They're on Fire!"[/skill].

1 - WoH Monk - I think we all know the build

If one of these components could go Ranger secondary for [skill=text]Greater Conflagration[/skill],putting even greater use for [skill=text]Mantra of Flame[/skill], then I may be tempted to turn the Earth Warder into a Snaring Water Ele utilizing [skill=text]Deep Freeze[/skill] and [skill=text]Ward Against Harm[/skill], leaving the Mesmer Snaring slot open to a Paragon, another Searer, or hey, maybe we'll just keep the Earth Warder and put them there.

GG's

it seems good in theory--- every tombs run I played MM and flawless 1 hour completion pretty much tho...

...but not everyone has a necro, ranger, or monk... especially with new chapters and new characters, its good that people are thinking of new ideas for it.

topk is win- my favorite pve spot hands down for the older content.

instead of 5 searing flames, you should replace one with a Mind Blast Mesmer (me/e) who will also use liquid flames

considering meteor shower is more useful as an interrupt (albeit long cast time) Id almost say that MS should be part of the Me/E bar as well- but not glowing gaze, as Mind Burn is energy management ( i havent capped this skill on my mesmer yet to test this theory- so if someone says it doesnt work, then I wont argue the point)

its true that the me/e is not as powerful damage wise... but if you already have more than two or three SF spammers, having a utility-support for interrupting the dryders or dealing with the ghostly horsemen (name eludes me)

It is my recommendation that you consider replacing one Ele with a Mesmer of at least some kind... doesnt the mesmer shut down the grasps too with sympathetic visage or am i thinking of something else??

/looking forward to 4 man Hero Tomb runs

SV has typically always been a good thing to put on a Tank in Tombs, as it completely and immediately shuts down the Grasp's skillset with the exception of 'To the Limit!', and Fingers. I haven't seen how it acts though now since the recent update that affected the way SV works though, but it may still be a good thing to put on the only thing resembling a Tank in the group, that being the Earth Warder.

Don't know what you mean by Mind Burn being Energy mgmt. though, and I need to play around more with Mind Blast.

Like you though, ToPK is my favorite pve content period and I keep coming back, but it's not fun to me just slicing through it with a b/p group, I like to make it a bit more challenging in balanced and nuker groups and such.