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Originally Posted by Voodoo Rage
The searing flames ele's have to go or just be seriously re-worked. They are just draining themselves to nearly zero energy almost every fight. I really don't want a hero team where I have to wait between each mob, I would like heroes with self sustaining energy. Not sure who I want to slot in their place, as a paragon player it would be really nice to still sneak in some other shouts from the heroes to make echos get refreshed automatically.
Any thoughts on Anthem of Envy? It's an adrenal based shout that affects ALLIES, so you are going to get a boost to both minions and spirits too.
no minions on this team bro... and besides, it won't work on them as they have no attack skills. i believe it still works on spirits, but any time you spend activating it is less time that you spend barraging, so I would shy away from it.
I really do not understand why you claim that the Searing Flames elementalists run out of energy, this has not been my experience at all. They have served me well in all sorts of places, including the strong energy denial and enchantment removal in The Deep and ToPK. Aside from my personal experience, you can also look at the Searing Flames template from PvX and see that the core skills are the same... I have added the necromancer skills (which cost nothing), Earthen Shackles as a snare (Earthen Shackles >> Deep Freeze as far as energy goes), Meteor for AoE damage and knockdown. All of this is pretty standard for a Searing Flames bar.
It's possible that the team might be better off by putting different skills on one of the elementalists so they do not overlap. However I find that the overlapping skill set helps to ensure that everyone gets snared and covered with burning, cracked armor, and weakness most of the time.
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Originally Posted by Chthon
Afraid I have little but criticism. Hopefully you will find some of it useful.
1. Your only significant damage mitigation is coming from "They're on Fire," TNtF, SYG, and weakness. That's really inadequate. Frankly, I'm amazed that you were able to finish the zones you were able to finish. I'd suggest dropping one of the bad heroes (I'll flag them as I go by) for a ST-Shelter or ER-Prot-Infuse.
Thank you for taking the time to write such detailed comments. I think many of your conclusions are incorrect though.
re: defense, TNTF + ToF together give just shy of 60% damage resistance against everything, and SYG increases that defense to about 74% for armor respecting damage. With such defense it seems a waste of a slot to bring an ST/communing rit; group defense is the paragon's job. Still I have had the same feeling that slotting Protective Spirit and some other prot on one of the heroes may be of benefit.
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Originally Posted by Chthon
2. Player build:
2.a. Do you really need Glowing Signet?
2.b. Burning Refrain is redundant.
2.c. IAtS is an awful, awful skill. I'd say to replace with Dodge This, but worry a little about anti-synergy with GftE. If Dodge This won't work, look at just about every other PvE skill before going back to IAtS.
2a: yes.
2b: Burning Refrain is not redundant at all. In normal use, Burning Refrain means that your Barrage lights everything on fire and the Searing Flames eles immediately start doing damage. In the case where you have more physical attackers, you put Burning Refrain on them as well. It is useful either way.
2c: IaTS is there because it boosts damage and has no activation time. It is not critical to the build, it can (and should) be changed as needed.
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3. Smiter.
3.1. This build is crap. Drop it entirely.
3.2. Damage is awful.
3.2.1. RoJ is likely to miss when you let heroes aim it, and has a 20sec recharge.
3.2.2. Smite stuff is undirected and inconsistent damage.
3.2.3. Judge's Insight is only conditionally useful in the context of lots of undead.
3.3. Command shouts can go on lots of other builds.
Your analysis of the smiter is entirely wrong, RoJ provides lots of armor ignoring damage and burning synergy with the paragon. Judge's Insight can boost the barrage damage (arrows only) by up to 87% against any type of foe, which in my view is well worth bringing. Against undead it is simply amazing. As for the paragon skills, they are generally useful... anti-pressure and group defense. There are certainly other heroes that one could bring instead of the smite monk, but it is not "crap". Look up RoJway.
re: judge's insight, see here: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Talk:...age_in crease
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4. Hybrid Rit
4.1. Clamor is not a bad skill
per se, now that lightning damage doesn't suck anymore, but it does less damage than SoS and doesn't offer the opportunity for energy gain that you have with SoS+Siphon. Replace with SoS
4.2. Lamentation is a joke. Replace with Siphon.
4.3. Recovery isn't bad, but usefulness is questionable if MBS is removing 4 conditions at a pop (3 from SoS + Life). Most people would suggest changing it for PwK.
5. If this build gets a rez, it should by FomF. It's going to revive with higher hp and (at 13 resto) higher energy than a Sig of Return at 0 leadership, with a faster cast time too.
The idea behind Clamor of Souls and Lamentation is direct AoE damage. I also run SoS/Bloodsong/SpiritSiphon on this rit sometimes. Clamor does AoE damage, SoS is single target. Which one is better depends on the area.
I agree with you about Recovery, when I run SoS I get rid of Recovery and replace it with spirit siphon because MBS is removing a lot of conditions already. Recovery is only for the Clamor rit.
re: FoMF, I do not like it at all. In the best case, the rit is at full health and you end up with two characters at half health. It's more likely that when your group is getting spiked characters will be at less than full health, and using FoMF means that both of them are likely to be killed. I prefer Signet of Return because it halves the risk, requires no investment and costs no energy at all. Not critical to the build in any case...
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5. SF builds.
5.1. These do not have enough energy management.
5.2. These do not have enough energy management.
5.3. In case you somehow missed it: These do not have enough energy management.
5.4. You definitely do not need 2x Enfeebling Blood. You probably do not need 2X Weaken Armor or Earthen Shackles.
5.5 So the solution is: SPLIT THE BUILDS.
5.5.1. On one build, drop the curses stuff, reassign the points to ES and maybe a little to earth, add Glowing Gaze, and add Mark of Rodgort (which will smooth out burning durations so that SF is always hitting for damage (and do a better job of it than all the other non-SF burning skills you've got currently put together)).
5.5.2. On the other build, drop Earthen Shackles, reassign the points to ES and maybe to curses, and add Glowing Gaze.
5.6 Meteor is really questionable.
I have not experienced any energy problems with these at all; aside from my experience (which you are free to ignore) you may also note that the core skills from the Searing Flames ele are all meta... fire attunement, GoLE, SF. In this build I have replaced Glowing Gaze with Aura of Restoration... firstly it covers fire attunement, secondly it gives +1 energy for any spell cast including the earth magic and necromancer spells. thirdly, any time spent casting glowing gaze is wasted time that the hero could spend casting searing flames. because of this I think Aura > GG in this case but it doesn't make much difference. Aside from this.... there are already three energy management skills on the bar (Fire Attunement, GoLE, Aura), are you really suggesting more?
I agree with you that dual weaken armor, enfeebling blood, earthen shackles may be overkill but I find that the overlap helps to keep foes covered all the time.
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6. The dom mes
6.1. This build is just really bad. You can skip reading the rest of my comments and just use Jeydra's dom mes if you want to save time.
6.2. Mirror of Disenchant and Complicate both need large homogeneous mobs to justify their recharges. Niche use only. Additionally, you should be killing things fast enough that Complicate is always going to be dubious in PvE.
6.3. Enchanter's Conundrum is only worthwhile if monsters have no ability to cast enchants at all or you've got a deep strip (and even then, heroes may not be smart enough to lead EC with the deep strip (which, you don't have anyway)). Run Panic or E-Surge if Panic isn't needed for survivability.
6.4. Shatter Delusions would be good if you had shatter-bait hexes in the team build or if the AI was smart enough to shatter sticky hexes at the last moment, but you don't and it isn't, so don't use it.
7. CoF is fine, but this build doesn't have the energy to support it on top of all the other expensive stuff it has.
Your analysis of the mesmer is entirely wrong but I will counter point by point.
6.1. I'm assuming that when you say "Jeydra's mesmer" you mean the standard Esurge/Mistrust/Cry/Unnatural domination build. This is meta and I use it too, if you read the notes on the Flameway page I even suggest it as an alternative.
6.2. re: Complicate, it disables skills on all enemies. This is extremely common in PvE as most mobs have the same type of foes. Disabling is even better than interrupting, the only thing that beats this is Panic.
re: mirror of disenchantment, it removes the enchantments from all enemies which again is very useful. critical defenses (raptors), conjure flame (charr), stoneflesh aura (dinos), any kind of elemental attunement and of course aegis are common examples.
6.3. Esurge does 90 damage on 15 recharge, EC does 100 damage on 10 recharge. With Shatter Delusions and fastcasting factored in this becomes 175 damage to all adjacent on 6 recharge. EC > Esurge as far as damage goes... but since it is not meta I suppose some people will reject it out of hand. Use Esurge if you prefer, it is not critical to the build. I also suggest Panic on the Flameway page as a more defensively oriented alternative, you may have missed that.
6.4 Shatter Delusions is intended to shatter EC, but it could also work on targets of Shared Burden, etc.
7. Energy is not a problem, did you notice Power Drain and Unnatural Signet?
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8. Ill mes.
8.1. This build is also crap. Drop it entirely. Possibly for another SF (probably paragon secondary for FB). Or a THunderclapper (in which case the curses SF needs to change). Or minions.
8.2. Mirror, same issue as above.
8.3. Fragility isn't very useful here since burning shouldn't be starting or ending very often. The only thing triggering it is going to be the crap condition skills on this bar.
8.4. Shared Burden is not going to stack the snare effect with Earthen Shackles, so it's really just a crappier version of Arcane Conundrum. If you really want to keep the Ill build, change this to Fevered Dreams (and bring better condition skills like Steam and Accumulated Pain, and then you could keep Frag).
8.5. Causing bleeding + poison is pretty worthless in any case since degen is wimpy. But it's especially worthless here since you've already got -7 degen from the burning, so over half the effect from bleeding + poison is going to be wasted. [Edit: I forgot the degen from Lamentation (which you should be removing anyway), which just makes bleeding + poison even more redundant.]
8.6. The weakness on Oppressive Gaze is redundant with EB, and the poison is worthless for the reason given above, so drop it.
8.7. Blood Ritual won't be neccesary if you fix the energy problems within the other builds.
Mostly agree with you on this one, of all the heroes this is the one that I feel least comfortable with. As you have surmised, the intent was to take advantage of condition spam and Fragility, but because we also intend to keep things covered in conditions all the time Fragility may not as effective.
I don't think that Shared Burden is "crap", as you say, because even though the snaring is capped at 50% the slower skill activation time helps.
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9. The healer.
9.1. This looks OK for a pure redbarup healer.
9.2. Not sure you really need a pure redbarup healer. You'd probably be better off with some mitigation (see #1) hybridized with some healing. Unfortunately, HBurst hybrids aren't possible for heroes because there's not enough attribute points for speccing inspiration, and not enough energy without it. (Player builds can use PvE skills for energy management.)
9.3. IV+resto is a comparable pure redbarup healer that also does damage. You might want to look at that.
This is generic healer, as I noted on the page... feel free to replace with whatever you want. Healing Burst gives you group healing along with strong single target healing, and this is something that N/Rt and E/Mo don't have.
Vigorous Spirit is also pretty strong in itself, especially with barrage.
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