Team Build: Dillway+Variants

Mainly because of all the hype involving spirits/minions :P They've been a staple of so many builds, that I wanted to do without, and show that difficult content can be done without them. An MM as you have is a great substitute for the E/Mo, but the build lacks defense that is only made up by SY - a feature that I want a build to not require, thus I use ST. I use it with only one spirit to make sure that spirit is always up, because it dies fairly fast. Otherwise, your build is great - but it'd only be for a melee that can maintain SY.

Also, ghostmirror should work well on a BiP, I'll try that ^^

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Upon request - Vloxen HM barless. One modification was made - I put in backfire for unnatural signet, because the healers were too difficult to put down without any assistance on the normal builds. It made me think outside the box, because normally I would've just taken technobabble and been done with it. In a way, I appreciate that - made me be more creative. :P

I pulled only in cases where I would've pulled a double aggro, and I wiped once in the case of a double aggro in an area about a third of the way through floor 2. It was a difficult run through, and this was my third try (the others I deemed failures after I wiped 2-3 times), so I would truly recommend people take a bar for it. :P

Edit: I should note that during the time I had a significant morale boost, it went much, much smoother. Enough that I'd consider popping two honeycombs and saving myself some pain if I was to do it over. Not entirely sure why it made such a difference, however.





For below, I kinda got sidetracked and forgot to screen, so I have no 'proof' I didn't use cons, you'll have to take my word on it. First and last level are proven, and for good measure I went back and took on a stone summit mob here just to help my point















I'll take a look at frostmaw's, and hopefully see what may work for it. My guess is that it'll be one dungeon that takes a bit more tweaking.

great job..love the idea of losing the mm 'cause i can't stand minions, will be sure to try this out in some simple vqs, does the rit put up shelter and use armor of unfeeling effectively? last thing, do you use any particular equipment on the heroes, i suppose a 40/40 for the mes', survivor insignia where one can seeing as e-management isn't a problem?
edit-just noticed the templates you posted have double bip (one without life and with the enchantment strip), and is missing the rt(only in the first team)- just a heads up

Well done Plutoman! Doing Vlox HM with several handicaps such as no player bar, no cons, no MM, no SY, and no offensive spirits is indeed worthy of praise.

One can overlook what "tactics" such as player positioning were used, or how many DP removals were burned.

Obviously including a player bar will only improve the times you posted.

Final verdict: Even in the hands of a normal player, "Dillway" will fare quite well.

3x mistrust without micro is pretty terrible in my experience. Even 2x is generally a waste, and that's assuming you are fighting nothing but casters. AI just does not chain it together very aggressively on a sinhle target for whatever reason. I'd watch your hero bars closely and see how many of their mistrusts just plain aren't recharging.

Quote: Originally Posted by Plutoman

I'll take a look at frostmaw's, and hopefully see what may work for it. My guess is that it'll be one dungeon that takes a bit more tweaking. I would say if you can clear Vloxen HM, you can do Frostmaws. Take your 2 Smiter team as ROJ rips up the wurms that all spawn in once spot. I would drop the Fall Backs in favor of hex removal in case Wurm Bile does get past an interrupt. Something like Hex Eater Sig or Inspired/Revealed Hex works nicely in Frostmaws.

Good luck!

Quote: Originally Posted by FoxBat 3x mistrust without micro is pretty terrible in my experience. Even 2x is generally a waste, and that's assuming you are fighting nothing but casters. AI just does not chain it together very aggressively on a sinhle target for whatever reason. I'd watch your hero bars closely and see how many of their mistrusts just plain aren't recharging. I've been doing that. Generally, the biggest problem I see is them not using Power Spike, and being very eager to use Wandering Eye over everything else. However, the firepower they bring gives them a lot of utility - they do use Mistrust, and often enough to warrant the three copies. I'll be sure to watch it specifically, though, and see if anything else works better.

Quote: Originally Posted by Jk Arrow

Do you generally micro your rit? On his own mine doesnt seem to use ST to keep Shelter up 100% of the time


Sorry, mixed the two skills up EDIT

Quote: Originally Posted by teh bestest is here

Do you generally micro your rit? On his own mine doesnt seem to use ST to keep Shelter up 100% of the time


Sorry, mixed the two skills up EDIT Im doing WoC HM, and i use his ST bar. I need to micro those 2 skills or else we can stay a few seconds without shelter.

Generally, in a more difficult area (HM elite areas, WoC HM might meed criteria), you'll need a bit of micro. The AI only reacts so fast with skill prioritization, and when a shelter goes up and down within seconds, it's not always the most immediate priority to replace it.

Anytime I enter the DoA HM, I tend to micro shared burden onto a big mob, as it can run at a lower priority sometimes, and shelter before a battle. I've rarely needed to during (I have not done WoC HM, though, heck, I haven't done NM), but if it's a particularly hard mob, or a difficult situation, it can't ever hurt to help prevent that few seconds downtime.

Sometimes, I wish I could code priority lists for the AI.. Such as, use this if this is happening, use this if energy <30%, etc. :P It'd be easy to keep all the issues to a minimum, then.

@ Plutoman: see you put sup runes on some heroes, do you thing Are worth the loss of 75hp?

Quote: Originally Posted by Tirzan

@ Plutoman: see you put sup runes on some heroes, do you thing Are worth the loss of 75hp? 95% of the time, yes. Most skills have increasing benefits beyond rank 12, and with shelter and protective spirit, 75 hp is the least of the worries, because that means 7.5 damage less per hit. It also means that the healers have less to heal, reducing the stress on them. It is to the advantage of the team to have protection, and have more damage and utility from the runes.

A few cases, obvious ones, don't need superior runes - an N/Rt resto does not need more than 8 blood magic for BiP, and only a minor rune on soul reaping. Taking any extra is a waste.

tried your original dillway with a melee, having a strength of honor on the smiter, not having them fully runed or equipped with optimal stuff exept a few 40/40s on the meses. did a few zm(hm),zv and todays zv with the unexpected woc quest(my bad) and it went great, the bip should be equipped correctly and i removed his res because he already loses health by himself, add foes ganging up on him and its not fun. great job plutoman, i'll be using your dillway on some elite areas!

Quote: Originally Posted by hankey

tried your original dillway with a melee, having a strength of honor on the smiter, not having them fully runed or equipped with optimal stuff exept a few 40/40s on the meses. did a few zm(hm),zv and todays zv with the unexpected woc quest(my bad) and it went great, the bip should be equipped correctly and i removed his res because he already loses health by himself, add foes ganging up on him and its not fun. great job plutoman, i'll be using your dillway on some elite areas! Ah, I totally forgot to add in my typical usage - I leave it disabled! Taking it off is fine, too, I like to have 5 copies in any elite area just in case there's an emergency and I need to retreat - if there's only 2-3 heroes left, I like to leave the best odds available.

Appreciate the (albeit accidental) reminder to me!

I think the ST Rit's Template code is bugged.

Furthermore, being a primary Mes, what could I change, as 4x mes seems kinda overkill to me? Maybe remove one and add in another RoJ/Invoker? Speaking of non-elite areas here.

Quote: Originally Posted by tkwondave

I think the ST Rit's Template code is bugged.

Furthermore, being a primary Mes, what could I change, as 4x mes seems kinda overkill to me? Maybe remove one and add in another RoJ/Invoker? Speaking of non-elite areas here. I still have to go fix the templates >.< Being lazy here, my apologies.

Tbh, I've been wanting to run 4x mesmers, and my first thought was towards Psychic Instability, regardless of the lack of synergy. I'm not sure how I'd mesh that out yet, though. There's so many useful elites in the mesmer lineup, though, that it'd be tempting to take another. Running an e-surge build with some direct damage would be ideal.

If you want to stick with 3x mesmer, another RoJ/invoke is perfectly fine, the invoke for easy vanquishes, the RoJ for medium/hard vanquishes. Typically, any area with some bad hexes will want the RoJ, unless you put hex removal on. I might go back and modify the invoke build to include some, because it definitely needs it.

At the moment, classes just started yesterday so fixing the builds hasn't been top priority >.< I should have some free time tonight, though, only one class today.

I took a break from DoA and tried this principle and its damage output is just nutty. Steamrolls. Nice work! I used 3 Dillway Mesmers, where the 3rd was a Necro primary. The rest: SoS Heals, SoGM, UA Smite, BiP Heals. Though I could probably replace the SoGM with another Dillway Necro (or change Raza into a proper Dillway Mesmer if I weren't so lazy).

I've been testing out this build as a Warrior primary and it seems pretty legit. It did have some problems with split-healer scenarios (as the OP mentioned), however a big part of that is probably my build which was a standard 100b bar. It is what I normally run and I wanted to use the same build at first so I had some kind of frame of reference. I think an Earthshaker or some kind of WE Daggers build would mesh pretty well with this setup, since they don't rely on any other buffs then SoH to deal damage coupled with the fact that they work well with locking down single targets (pesky healers) as well as being decent at handling grouped mobs.

All in all this build isn't really super controversial, but it is really well put together and it works really well. I was reckless when I tested it to push its limits somewhat and only died once which was due to pulling a boss-group in addition to a full caster-group. That test-run I intentionally went minimal on the micro, only putting SoH on myself and the occasional Shelter. I didn't flag at all. Despite that I was hard-pressed to put any real pressure on the group. I can definitively recommend trying it out if someone is still on the fence.

Quote: Originally Posted by PurpleFlamingo

(I realize this teambuild requires a mercenary. If you don't have mercenaries, just image an RoJ monk or an Invoke ele or something in there instead ) Razah's main profession can be change to make the 3rd Mesmer.

Updated all the templates.

As I mentioned in my lil update, I'll play around some more with some higher damage variants intended for more advanced play, in addition to a 6-man party version. I'll see about an UW version, too, but that might be a while.

I have not tested this group in the FoW or ToPK, so if anyone tries it there, let me know how it is.

@Anaraky - I typically play an invoke ele, so a bit of spiking power. The split healers are generally why I recommend a player spiking bar. I don't play a warrior, in fact, I really don't play any professions at all besides ele, but I can certainly theory-craft a build utilizing this concept intended for a non-spiking player. Generally, that'll mainly involve editing the mesmers for a bit less AoE and a bit more single-target (it would probably only change one skill on each, 2 at the most, doing a divide between anti-melee and anti-caster AoE), along with possibly a single target smite skill on each of the smiters. I'm only guessing at this point, but that's what I'd first look at doing.

Good stuff Pluto, good stuff.
I've used a very similar team build on my ele when 7H were introduced, but not for very long time(cause i had left to do a couple of dg/vq only for gwamm).
No mercenaries(Shared+ Dom or Illu), Bip wasn't in vouge, only one between ST and emo, sometimes Roj or invokes added....but i really like that someone decided to develop this setup.
The only annoying fact is the need of a merc or Razah (sacrificing the 2nd rit, which is a shame), but stay sure:i'll use this on my primary mez.