Transitioning Over to HM -- Any Help?

HM is all about optimizing your player builds so that they synergize for maximum effect.

- Get rid of skills like troll unguent, healing breeze, fire nukes, poison, bleeding, and other suboptimal damage or healing. Enemy armor is high and the damage can come in spikes. You want something that costs little and delivers big.

- The best damage comes from heavily "buffed" warriors and assassins (dervs work too). Blossom spam can do more damage than your entire party does if he is enchanted with two or three buffs (Order of Pain, Greater Dwarf Weapon, and Strength of Honor are great). Have one of your necromancers run this with enfeebling blood and mindbender as the optionals. Call targets (but make sure everyone attacks what he calls; even the casters can if they carry spears!).

However, mesmers and smite monks also have options. Don't stick self-heals or survival gear on your damage dealers; they should have killer builds that produce consistent, massive armor-ignoring damage.

- Damage mitigation comes in two flavors: team-wide and stuff the monks carry. Enfeebling blood is GREAT (area affect melee shutdown!). Aegis is good (AOE block). Save Yourselves! gives 100 armor to the other 7 party members (nigh-on invulnerability), but requires good adrenaline management to keep "up" alot. Don't think about just yourself; if you are a midliner with an extra slot, bring something which helps everyone. As you start optimizing your monks for healing, protection, energy management, hex removal, and condition removal, you may find it very hard to find room for a res :-)

Sabway and Discordway are designed for heroes; don't shove em' into a human team. There are stronger, smarter, and most importantly more fun options! However, a minion master can provide damage mitigation but you'll have to let the minions go in early. If you have a human ritualist player with signet of spirits, protective spirit him and send him in front to throw up a spirit wall.

I'd be happy to meet you guys in game, take a look at your builds and play a bit.

Quote: Originally Posted by Cuilan

Protective Spirit is your friend.

The big stumbling block in transitioning to hard mode is that it forces you to play the game on a more abstract level. Normal mode you can largely bludgeon through with 'damage and heal'. Hard mode forces you to capitalize on abilities that are a level removed from that - disruption and shutdown. These require a good bit more precision than damage and heal, but ultimately provide a lot more power.

The goal on defense isn't to bring enough healing to clean up all the damage - it's to bring enough tools to make the mobs incapable of dealing significant damage. This sort of proactive defense can either be shutdown (weakness, blind, daze, hexes, knockdowns) or defensive buffs (aegis, prot spirit, there's nothing to fear, save yourselves, stand your ground). These in combination do a much better job at keeping your team alive than direct heals ever can. On offense, the focus is upon making the mobs unable to defend themselves (daze, knockdowns, enchant removal) and damage amplification (cracked armor, barbs, order of pain, GDW).

These aren't jobs that particular characters do while everyone else does damage or heals - these are the jobs that *everyone* does while dishing out damage or healing in between. When people are thinking in these terms you don't need to have particular strategies or builds because it will just work with rudimentary tactics (pulling, focusing dangerous targets). The trick is just making that transition. Warriors need to stop thinking like tanks or DPS, and start thinking about how to keep a dangerous enemy knocked down while pummeling on it, or how to keep Save Yourselves on the team. Elementalists need to stop thinking about AoEing helpless enemies, and start thinking about making them helpless with blind, weakness, and cracked armor. Monks need to ride their team doing a better job of keeping enemies incapacitated and focus on hardening cracks in the armor with prot, and making sure everyone stays running at full strength with cleaning.

Most of the hero builds people suggest here and in other threads are effective because those bars implement many of these ideas with skills that the AI can use reasonably well. If you and your friends understand what those hero bars are trying to accomplish and can do that yourself, you won't have any problems with hard mode, no matter what character classes you're using.

Quote: Originally Posted by Ensign

These aren't jobs that particular characters do while everyone else does damage or heals - these are the jobs that *everyone* does while dishing out damage or healing in between. When people are thinking in these terms you don't need to have particular strategies or builds because it will just work with rudimentary tactics (pulling, focusing dangerous targets). Excellent post! Definitely agree with these comments. I laughed when the OP said the Elementalists in their guild would be disappointed. Trust me they can be more than useful in HM. Eles have tons of options with their large energy pool, especially when you start adding in PvE skills. Stuff you might not use in NM since you don't need it becomes more important in HM, like snares or wards for example. Experimenting is a fun part of the game, especially with other dedicated players to discuss things like what went wrong last time. Good luck.

It's been a while but.

How do you and your guild fare molepunch? DId the thread help?

the_jos, Malician and Ensign:

Thanks for the insight. It makes a lot of sense and I'm trying to relay your input to the rest. Only one other player in the guild can grasp the concept. The rest are more casual players, and may take time to start having "less monotoned" builds. Our elementalists for example carry 7 attack spells, but don't consider other skills as better options (they still only get off aoe-ing helpless enemies). I think until the rest can start thinking in terms of how to help the team mitigate or increase damage output, HM is gonna be a threshold just too high.


Steps:

Well, Discordway worked, but it wasn't fun at all. I didn't feel like I was playing a warrior at all. It's a means to an end, but it just isn't fun to play. Very effective though. I think all it did was make us all feel that Necros are OP lol.

It's OK, all in good time. I think HM isn't something the other casual players in the guild can hope to do successfully, and I'm ok with leaving it at that until they start wanting to do more. As it is, they can barely pull off a NM mission successfully on their own, and I often have to suggest skills they should bring should I lead the mission.



Thanks again everyone for your expertise and help.

Quote: Originally Posted by Ensign

The big stumbling block in transitioning to hard mode is that it forces you to play the game on a more abstract level. Normal mode you can largely bludgeon through with 'damage and heal'. Hard mode forces you to capitalize on abilities that are a level removed from that - disruption and shutdown. These require a good bit more precision than damage and heal, but ultimately provide a lot more power. I wish you were right, but actually even in HM you can usually just bludgeon through most things with straight damage and two pure heal monks backing you up.

Quote: Originally Posted by molepunch

....
Only one other player in the guild can grasp the concept. The rest are more casual players, and may take time to start having "less monotoned" builds. Our elementalists for example carry 7 attack spells, but don't consider other skills as better options (they still only get off aoe-ing helpless enemies). I think until the rest can start thinking in terms of how to help the team mitigate or increase damage output, HM is gonna be a threshold just too high.
...
As it is, they can barely pull off a NM mission successfully on their own, and I often have to suggest skills they should bring should I lead the mission. molepunch,

I'll give you some additional advice from my personal experience.
When you like to play HM more with guildies don't bring them all at once.
Just take the one player who understands and bring one or two other guildies. Fill the rest of the team with relatively fail-safe hero builds.
This increases the experience more than failing over and over again because 'the team build' doesn't work.

If you like to play some HM outside your guild or with a minimal number of your guildies feel free to PM me here on guru.
I don't play often anymore but am still online once in a while.
And perhaps more important I can introduce you to some players who have been playing HM for a long time and who always like to meet new people to tag along for some fun.

Quote:
It's a pity that only certain builds work in HM, it seems, but I suppose that's just how the metagame goes. I would disagree. There are certain builds that are more effective in HM, but you do not need to run them. Of course, don't do something silly like bringing Searing Flames vs. Destroyers, either.

Quote: Originally Posted by qvtkc

I wish you were right, but actually even in HM you can usually just bludgeon through most things with straight damage and two pure heal monks backing you up.
With consum and PvE skills, yes this is too true.

Unfortunately bringing two heal monks won't be the best way to go imo. You need prot of some sort. Red Bars up was great in NM, but a significant area of HM will need more, especially if you're pugging.

problem with using discord and sabway is:

1. the human is pretty much neglected. As the topic creator noted, it just takes advantage of the computer AI and "poor game design"/"game mechanic exploitation" (choose whichever you like better). Personally, I feel better using my earthshaker build and bring heroes that can support me (either through healing, prot, barbs, minions, strength of honor, splinter, etc.). Course, discord is a means to the end. However, it rubs some people the wrong way.

2. If you ever ever stop using discord, you'll get creamed. Using sabway and discord doesn't teach you anything. Except maybe target calling. There are a LOT of different viable ways to do HM. Key overpowered skills are good, but many other skills are also viable.

In response to the opening question, I would say a few things I include in all my team setups:

1. Humans are awesome, if played correctly. They are better than AI in pretty much everything but minion management. As such, they can pump out a crapton of damage through pve skills and logical thinking (hey I can neutralize that hammer war by snaring him, then take out the rest of the team). Take advantage of that. Of course, I've had a lot of success with playing the support build myself (such as ether renewal ele and great dwarf weapon'd rangers/pets), but I generally play the damage dealer role since it's more fun for me

2. I like to think there are three main types of healing: power healing, party healing, and prot. Try to include all of them in your team set up. Power heals like WoH (I don't use it much but it is quite good), dwayna's kiss, spirit light. Prot like Save yourselves, prot spirit, aegis, union, weapon of warding (I don't use this much, since it goes down very fast, but it is prot). Finally party healing is key too. Why use 8 power heals to heal the team when you can drop a protective was kaolai or use heaven's delight? Not many skills here. I personally wouldn't recommend heal party due to energy costs (and the hero's poor use of it), but it's up to you.

Of course, try to through in some hex and condition removal somewhere in there, but you get the idea.

I've a question regarding weakness and cracked armour .

which is better for HM ?

AoE weakness - Enfeebling Blood or AoE cracked armour - Weaken Armour

Enfeebling blood - 10% hp sac, 1 energy cost, 3/4s cast time, 8s recharge

Weaken armour - 5 energy cost, 1s cast time, 5s recharge

Weakness is a much superior condition.
Cracked Armour is only something you bring in a pitiful attempt to make elemental damage viable. The effect of Cracked Armour becomes somewhat trivial as AL increases.

Weakness on the other hand will turn a 90 damage auto-attack into a 30 damage one.

I personally would go with Enfeebling Blood - that weakness, especially on melee enemies, saves your party from a lot of grief. It's one heck of a damage mitigation skill. Of course, don't oversacrifice...

Quote: Originally Posted by Lusciious

which is better for HM ? No simple better

Weakness is defensively very strong as it reduces base-damage from physical attacks to 1/3 very usefull against melee (and archer) mobs, not so against casters.

Cracked armor is offensive, it increases non-armor-ignoring damage by 41%. If your party brings a lot of armor-ignoring damage then this is not so effective.

Hi all, thanks again for the responses.


the_jos: Haha, really appreciate your offer but most of the guild play at GMT+8, so you might be a asleep. Or should be, LOL. Besides, casual players get intimidated by much better gamers, and I think they would feel stressed out. Unless they really want to keep at it (HM), I would just leave group gameplay at the post-newbie level they are comfortable with. Thanks again! They still have plenty of content to grind out in GW, so maybe it was premature of them to even consider HM in the first place.


subherbandog: Yep, you are right, all Discordway did for the core players in our guild, myself included, was to breeze through HM and learning nothing. I'm a bit of a Samurai when it comes to things, and I do not like having to resort to cheeseway just to get things done. Also, I didn't feel I was playing a Warrior--the fun ended there. We resort to it time to time these days, but we try not to.



One day, HM will be our default, heh!

Quote: Originally Posted by Lusciious

I've a question regarding weakness and cracked armour .

which is better for HM ?

AoE weakness - Enfeebling Blood or AoE cracked armour - Weaken Armour

Enfeebling blood - 10% hp sac, 1 energy cost, 3/4s cast time, 8s recharge

Weaken armour - 5 energy cost, 1s cast time, 5s recharge Cracked armor isn't as good as Enfeebling blood. Weakness is so good for survivability that every team should have some source of it.

Cracked armor is meh. People don't use physicals compared to the popular necros and monks and rits. And the benefit isn't too impressive.

Quote: Originally Posted by MasterSasori

People don't use physicals compared to the popular necros and monks and rits. And the benefit isn't too impressive. When it comes to damage dealing, only Necromancers can compete with physicals in a PvE setting (and even then the Necro depends on physicals for it, be it MoP or OoU).

However cracked armour is of small value to physicals. It is only of real value to Elementalists trying to output some damage from their elemental skills.

Right .. Alright then . I'll get enfeebling blood . Thanks for your opinions