Why vanquishing and missions are meaningless for comparison

Some people have posted variants of "I did all missions / VQs with this build and had no trouble", or "I don't care about how fast I do things, I care about no micro + finishing whatever I set out to do" in support of their builds.

Here is why this argument is completely meaningless.



I ran all the Animate spells I could find on the Necro, except I ran out of Animate spells and had to run Masochism and Malign Intervention for more / higher level minions ...
I ran all the Channeling spirits I could find, then ran out of them and just used three resses ...
I ran all the offensive Communing spirits I could find with some energy management and more resses (of course) ...
I ran 20 Fire Flare spam with Mark of Rodgort + Conjure Flame on myself and Vekk ...
I used the first eight alphabetical non-elite Healing Prayers spells for Tahlkora and the first eight Protection Prayers spells for Dunkoro ...
I used my never-before-used Jora, who still has default skills ...

... and I vanquished Mount Qinkai without problems! I did no micro, I ran up to mobs to cast Double Dragon, I found out that wanding with Conjure Flame does almost as much damage as Flare spam does, and I had no problems. Kill speed + run speed was atrociously slow compared to the builds I'm used to running, but I had no problems.

In short: being able to do vanquishes and missions is no indication of a build's strength. All good builds should be able to do VQs and missions with no problems, but the converse is not true.

This should be a sticky

This should clearly be the new hero meta

Okey?
12chars

Good work,
your next challenge is to bring as little skills as possibly on your bars, maybe just 1-2 skills each

Lol, my eyes hurt initially when I saw your builds without reading what you intended to do. While what you say is true for some areas, other areas would pose problems with a similar build. It just so happens that most areas can be ran with almost any build. It also so happens that people want to say their particular build is the most efficient.

Use it for all 100ish areas of gw.
I mean, all we know that VQing isn't THE way to rate a build, cause all non-mediocre build scaled for HM will do. Can't really see the point.

That's the whole point of the thread. A rather large number of people think their build is amazing because it can handle a few HM vanquishes/missions.

Quote: Originally Posted by Jeydra

In short: being able to do vanquishes and missions is no indication of a build's strength. All good builds should be able to do VQs and missions with no problems, but the converse is not true. Mmmhkay.

To back this up, did you REALLY need to try it yourself, take screenshots and then report back?

Sticky this, someone!

This is so true!

This build sucks... Lacks Echo Mending

Using a shit team build on MQ, which is one of the easiest vanquishes in the game, doesn't prove anything. You could run much worse builds through MQ, with 2-3 skills per hero if you really wanted to. You were still using 3 pretty core heroes, 2x spirit spammers and a MM, you could probably do the vanquish with just those 3 heroes if you had heal area somewhere.

I did all missions, VQs, dungeons and elite areas with my build while playing with various people and sometimes heroes and had no trouble.

There, I fixed that.

+100 internet points for you Sir for this thread!

Mount Qinkai is an easy Vanquish intended to provide quick Luxon faction. Though in general your idea is true.

If there are mobs with heavy hexes, Mesmer with Hex Eater Vortex and Shatter Hex can help a lot. Areas heavy with conditions, Dervish running Avatar of Melandru helps a lot. But often you can power your way through anyway I will admit.

Example Mamnoon Lagoon. Four characters VQ'd it. All started with identical heroes and identical general PvE builds for heroes.

1. Ranger: No problems, just another day. Pet Build with Haste and Otyugh's Cry.
2. Warrior: Chop nasty Wind Riders up with Axe auto attacks. No problems.
3. Paragon: Rough ride. Semi Imbagon build not the best idea. Not enough DPS. But finished.
4. Assassin: Caster mode. Got crushed like right away. Hopeless.

Switched to Daggers, threw on Shadow Form; overkill was Hex Eater Vortex on Mesmer with Shatter Hex. Easy run. So, it depends on a lot of things.

Jeydra, have you tried this in Majesty's Rest? Curious.

GOGOGO Jokos domain / majesty's rest and then qq

Mount qinkai is one bad example of a place to vq - and its mainly down to the case of any build can be used in the team and still do it - its one of the easiest places going.
Ive vq mq with builds that not even a noob would run - eg ursin ( ursan , aos and any dagger fillers ) in a team with 2 monks and the last 5 in team used what they wanted - no team synergy or build synergy and we still vq in 20 mins with very little probs.
It can even be done same time using hench , heros , mercs with no set team builds.
Hell i dont even micro my heros - i tend to let them get on with things themselves.
Remember gw and its campaigns have been around for a few years now so players have that much more exp of zones , little exploits like using terrain and which bosses can be pulled away from groups and this info gets passed along.
Some Dungeons can be done with as little as 3 players , some places can be vq with just 1 or 2 players which when gw was released and hm + vq was thought of - they thought of full party rather than us players evolving gameplay and being ahead of the challenge and using smaller parties.
I think in gw history probably the best example of us beating anet would be the old 55 monk who has been around for ages in form or another - and even a few years ago the nerf to mystic regen only made the 55 mo/d revert bk to old school 55.

I had a different interpretation of this. Heroes are going to run a bad build better than the average GW player would. Some of those builds are easily PuG worthy.

A testament to the power of skills like Signet of Spirits?
Or is Flare OP?

Quote: Originally Posted by Gabs88

This build sucks... Lacks Echo Mending You did not read his post, did you?

I love this kind of stuff. I love the fact that people will run "what most think is crap" and get away with it.

Like the other day when I went to Depths of Destruction with a human team. We already had an SoS, and 3 melee/ranged characters.....Plus during the quest you get the 3 golems that we can set to melee.

I got ripped into about wanting to run Echo, Gdw, splinter...then a bunch of fill in skills. No one could see the point of echo. Echo gdw...fill in with spinter, but i digress

The only thing I see about your build is... You still have a MM and 2 spirit spammers. Yes, you can more or less build anything around this combination, because it takes so much pressure off your party.

In my mind, if you want to further validate your thoughts.....take out at least 2 of the 3 or all of them and then let us know how things go.