Here's my latest hero setup, works with the player being a warrior, not sure about other professions. Note, this is a different setup from the one I posted in the "What Heroes for Warrior" thread earlier today, although the classes and some of the concepts are similar. This is a much stronger setup than that one, as I've had a lot more bake time optimizing this one.
P/Mo Motivation paragon with Strength of Honor, Hexbreaker Aria
P/Rt Command Paragon with Splinter Weapon
N/Mo Minion bomber with Empathic, Dwayna's and some Curses
The motigon uses Anthem of Fury to give himself and the command guy +4 adrenaline. This allows for a very rapidly obtained Hexbreaker Aria, as well as more frequent spammage of adrenaline-based chants (which are energy management for both paragons). More chants = more of those good Finales triggering.
The command guy does splinter weapon and spirits, and his disruption and envy anthems affect his spirits. As I made reference to in another thread, you have 6 entities here (3 spirits + 2 paragons + you) who take advantage of Anthem of Envy and Disruption, and Anthem of Envy is not consumed if you hit someone above 50% health, so it will stick around until used (or it times out). The command guy also supplies the deep wound, which you can optionally pre-cast on yourself before the next battle so it's up again earlier.
Conditions are dealt with quite well by Purifying Finale, Foul Feast, Empathic, but if they are still a problem for the area you are in, you can move Anthem of Fury to the command guy and put Song of Purification on the motigon. However you'll lose the spirits and their side-benefits from the shouts.
Hexes are taken care of fairly well between Empathic and the rapidly obtained Hexbreaker Aria.
Spear mastery is not really very relevant to these guys, as they have only one attack skill, which is used to trigger various things.
Both of them use Spear of Lightning as their attack skill, due to its low recharge. The Weaken Armor on necro/Chest Thumper trick on paragons unfortunately doesn't work out in this setup, because the necro ends up being too busy doing other things to be quick enough on the Weaken Armor.
Command P/Rt
10+1+1 leadership
8+1 command
8+1 spear mastery
10 channeling
Signet of Spirits {elite}
Splinter Weapon
Spear of Lightning
"Never give up!"
"Find their weakness!"
"Go for the eyes!"
Anthem of Disruption
Anthem of Envy
Motivation P/Mo
12+1+1 leadership
10+1 motivation
2+1 spear mastery
8 smiting
Anthem of Fury {elite}
Strength of Honor
Spear of Lightning
Hexbreaker Aria
Blazing Finale
Finale of Restoration
Purifying Finale
"They're on Fire!"
N/Mo minion bomber
10+1+1 Death magic
8+1 Soul Reaping
10+1 Curses
8 Healing Prayers
Empathic Removal {elite}
Dwayna's Sorrow
Animate Bone Minions
Death Nova
Rip Enchantment
Enfeebling Blood
Foul Feast
Signet of Lost Souls
My double paragon hero setup
Gigashadow
MercenaryKnight
Seems really odd imo. 1 paragon has 10 channeling for splinter weapon and signet of spirits. The other has 8 smiting for a single skill which is going to be bad.
Just don't see it being that great atm.
Just don't see it being that great atm.
Gigashadow
While unusual, it works really well. 8 smiting is fine and adds a fair amount of damage; people often run 10 smiting or so on other secondary smiting characters for SoH, and the difference between and 8 and 10 spec is a whole 2 points of damage per hit, or between 8 and 12 spec (which is a ton of attribute points) is only 5 points per hit. Paragons get great energy management returns from their adrenaline shouts, so -1 energy regen is really not a big deal to him. He was a great place to stick SoH as he wasn't otherwise using a secondary, and it frees up someone else's secondary.
Splinter weapon is a spell you put on a character that can preferably cast it on recharge. The trick is to find a character that has the pacing required where it can do that, while having useful skills on the rest of his bar. The command paragon has a couple of shouts with no cast time, and other skills on medium recharges, so splinter is well suited to him. The 3 spirits do provide quite a bit of benefit, their interrupts alone are very noticeable, let alone the damage.
This is actually the strongest of the hero setups I've run in Guild Wars to date, and I've run all the usual stuff.
Splinter weapon is a spell you put on a character that can preferably cast it on recharge. The trick is to find a character that has the pacing required where it can do that, while having useful skills on the rest of his bar. The command paragon has a couple of shouts with no cast time, and other skills on medium recharges, so splinter is well suited to him. The 3 spirits do provide quite a bit of benefit, their interrupts alone are very noticeable, let alone the damage.
This is actually the strongest of the hero setups I've run in Guild Wars to date, and I've run all the usual stuff.
IronSheik
Conditions are lol in PvE
I do like the disruption syncing with Signet of spirits...but still quite the odd setup
I'd take vicious over FTW, although I guess FTW can be used to find a better thing to DW.
I'll bookmark this to try out later.
I do like the disruption syncing with Signet of spirits...but still quite the odd setup
I'd take vicious over FTW, although I guess FTW can be used to find a better thing to DW.
I'll bookmark this to try out later.
Super Igor
looks pretty random.
Synergiez tho.
Why are you running FF? You have enough condition removal on your bar imo.
Synergiez tho.
Why are you running FF? You have enough condition removal on your bar imo.
Carnivorous Cupcake
Looks strange but I can see it has a good synergy and might work well.
I will try it on my Warrior and post the results, after all, Discordway looked strange too when it first came out! ^^
I will try it on my Warrior and post the results, after all, Discordway looked strange too when it first came out! ^^
Racthoh
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Originally Posted by Gigashadow
The point of him having that one skill is to trigger the anthem of fury on himself to get 5 adrenaline from one hit, as well as to also trigger attack skill chants (interrupt, +damage), and various other on-chant-end effects on himself. That is all the spear mastery is there for, this guy is just not set up to do damage with his spears, so his level of spear mastery is irrelevant to him. It could be 0, he just happened to have a minor spear rune still on him from previous, more conventional paragon builds.
I'm not generally that impressed with the damage of spears, and that is not why I bring paragons in a H/H setup where I control the build of only 3 heroes instead of a full team; the chants/shouts/echoes are what I am really after here. And although I don't have them in this particular setup, many spear skills that I would consider for their utility (deep wound, stance removal, interrupt) don't even require much of an investment, or are in leadership (spear swipe).
In this setup, most of the time of the paragons should preferably be spent casting those. This is also why I'm using Anthem of Fury instead of skills such as Soldier's Fury/Aggressive Refrain etc. which benefit from you continuously attacking; he is not continuously attacking; instead, he throws the odd attack in here and there to trigger things and get the big adrenaline return every 10 seconds, then immediately goes back to chanting.
On the subject of condition removal I agree, more than really needed, I can get rid of Foul Feast on the necro.
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Originally Posted by Axel Zinfandel
I'm not generally that impressed with the damage of spears, and that is not why I bring paragons in a H/H setup where I control the build of only 3 heroes instead of a full team; the chants/shouts/echoes are what I am really after here. And although I don't have them in this particular setup, many spear skills that I would consider for their utility (deep wound, stance removal, interrupt) don't even require much of an investment, or are in leadership (spear swipe).
In this setup, most of the time of the paragons should preferably be spent casting those. This is also why I'm using Anthem of Fury instead of skills such as Soldier's Fury/Aggressive Refrain etc. which benefit from you continuously attacking; he is not continuously attacking; instead, he throws the odd attack in here and there to trigger things and get the big adrenaline return every 10 seconds, then immediately goes back to chanting.
On the subject of condition removal I agree, more than really needed, I can get rid of Foul Feast on the necro.
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Leadership- 9 +1
Motivation- 9+ 2 + 1
Smiting Prayers- 9
Spear Mastery- 9+1
Spear of Redemption
Wild Throw
Merciless Spear
Song of Purification (E)
Ballad of Restoration
Chorus of Restoration / "Go For the Eyes" (GFTE for low adrenal energy management. even with no points, it's at least half decent)
Aggressive Refrain
Strength of Honor
A great deal better attribute spread and ridiculous energy management to cover for the lack of regen. Because of the need for adrenaline, consider an orders hero to help.
If you don't want song of Purification (though that one skill pretty much makes conditions go away), you can sub it for something like Anthem of Fury and put a +2 rune on Leadership instead of Motivation You took out "They're on Fire!" and "Blazing Finale" though, which are the main attractions of the setup, as ToF has substantial party-wide damage reduction that also works on yourself (unlike SY), not to mention being yet another shout to trigger various things every 10 seconds, and conveniently having no cast time.
As you point out, the problem with the above will be adrenaline. This is one reason why it's tougher to make these sorts of setups work when you have control over only 3 hero builds and are trying to take a couple of paragons; you need to fit in all the usual stuff you want in builds, and then you are really tempted to try to squeeze in Dark Fury somewhere as well (and maybe Orders as well), as that supercharges everything the paragons do. But then, to take the most advantage of that, you'd really like them to be attacking most of the time (and perhaps using a personal attack speed/adrenaline increaser as well), rather than casting chants most of the time as they do now. If they're attacking most of the time, you'd then want them to have some proper level of attributes in spears, etc. Going down that path tends to work against the chant focus I was experimenting with.
With only 3 heroes, you can see my bizarre use of secondaries on the paragons to squeeze in splinter weapon and strength of honor on them, at the expense of their spear mastery, in order to leave my third hero free for other things. I feel the tradeoff of spear mastery for splinter and SoH was worth it in this setup though, as they don't really attack much.
One thing about experimenting with adrenaline skills on paragon heroes is that you really have to watch their skill bar while you're fighting and see if which skills they are using or neglecting. I've spent a whole bunch of time on this, and Spear of Lightning (for example) is something they will use fairly often. Having 3 or more adrenaline skills often results in starvation, depending on what you have. Some other skills that often seem like a great idea, don't get used; for example, Wearying Spear seems ideal for paragons with low to moderate spear mastery, because it does a lot of +bonus damage, and you don't really care that much about weakess at such low levels; unfortunately, the AI rarely uses it.
Motivation- 9+ 2 + 1
Smiting Prayers- 9
Spear Mastery- 9+1
Spear of Redemption
Wild Throw
Merciless Spear
Song of Purification (E)
Ballad of Restoration
Chorus of Restoration / "Go For the Eyes" (GFTE for low adrenal energy management. even with no points, it's at least half decent)
Aggressive Refrain
Strength of Honor
A great deal better attribute spread and ridiculous energy management to cover for the lack of regen. Because of the need for adrenaline, consider an orders hero to help.
If you don't want song of Purification (though that one skill pretty much makes conditions go away), you can sub it for something like Anthem of Fury and put a +2 rune on Leadership instead of Motivation You took out "They're on Fire!" and "Blazing Finale" though, which are the main attractions of the setup, as ToF has substantial party-wide damage reduction that also works on yourself (unlike SY), not to mention being yet another shout to trigger various things every 10 seconds, and conveniently having no cast time.
As you point out, the problem with the above will be adrenaline. This is one reason why it's tougher to make these sorts of setups work when you have control over only 3 hero builds and are trying to take a couple of paragons; you need to fit in all the usual stuff you want in builds, and then you are really tempted to try to squeeze in Dark Fury somewhere as well (and maybe Orders as well), as that supercharges everything the paragons do. But then, to take the most advantage of that, you'd really like them to be attacking most of the time (and perhaps using a personal attack speed/adrenaline increaser as well), rather than casting chants most of the time as they do now. If they're attacking most of the time, you'd then want them to have some proper level of attributes in spears, etc. Going down that path tends to work against the chant focus I was experimenting with.
With only 3 heroes, you can see my bizarre use of secondaries on the paragons to squeeze in splinter weapon and strength of honor on them, at the expense of their spear mastery, in order to leave my third hero free for other things. I feel the tradeoff of spear mastery for splinter and SoH was worth it in this setup though, as they don't really attack much.
One thing about experimenting with adrenaline skills on paragon heroes is that you really have to watch their skill bar while you're fighting and see if which skills they are using or neglecting. I've spent a whole bunch of time on this, and Spear of Lightning (for example) is something they will use fairly often. Having 3 or more adrenaline skills often results in starvation, depending on what you have. Some other skills that often seem like a great idea, don't get used; for example, Wearying Spear seems ideal for paragons with low to moderate spear mastery, because it does a lot of +bonus damage, and you don't really care that much about weakess at such low levels; unfortunately, the AI rarely uses it.
Yes, I can see how it is geared for melee. However, most of those skills would also help any player that uses martial weapons including Rangers and Paragons, even more so if they use adrenal skills. It's Blazing Finale that wouldn't be so good, and Strength of Honor would be useless without some melee in the party.
The thing is, I'm not a great fan of using SY! with a melee character... I seem to be out of shout range of some party members at the worst moment, or SY! drops when I'm snared or running between scattered targets. I prefer using SY! on my Paragon or Ranger since they don't have to run around so much, and tend to stay in the mid-line with most of the party within shout range.
The thing is, I'm not a great fan of using SY! with a melee character... I seem to be out of shout range of some party members at the worst moment, or SY! drops when I'm snared or running between scattered targets. I prefer using SY! on my Paragon or Ranger since they don't have to run around so much, and tend to stay in the mid-line with most of the party within shout range.
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