This feels borderline impossible to achieve with a physical Revenant build. Staff is great for breaking the bar of course, but it is somewhat terrible for dealing any follow-up damage, plus it builds 5 stacks of damage resistance right away which is not ideal. Swapping over to Sword for damage dealing purposes after the stun can also only be done once in a blue moon when the frustrating condition that keeps increasing the cooldowns kicks in; so you can’t just swap back and forth to deal proper damage between stuns, plus a big part of physical Revenant DPS comes from the auto-attack which is also put on a cooldown. Mace is also kinda out of the question on a physical build. And while Hammer is good, it’s not ideal for this fight. The cooldowns become insane at 25 stacks, and the Alacrity buff it then applies doesn’t remotely help reducing the cooldowns enough to have skills available again, so you run around at a snails pace, trying to evade some attacks without being able to do anything at all. Breaking the bar only leaves a very small window to deal any sort of physical damage for that matter, making me feel as if this was designed purely for condition builds that can keep ticking after they’ve been applied. Why, ArenaNet?
It certainly doesn’t help that the Self-Doubt is using Sword and you will need to wait for it to have performed its Unrelenting Assault (which lets it evade) before you can break the bar. If you don’t wait for that, you risk wasting a valuable CC. I did that a couple of times before I learned my lesson. Ugh!
Kiting is also somewhat out of the question, mainly due to the higher stacks you get as time goes on, which also slows your movement, but also because the Self-Doubt has the aforementioned Sword weapon, which makes it use Precision Strike, afflicting you with Chilled status frequently, slowing you down, plus increasing your cooldowns..
Sword/Sword is kinda mediocre at breaking the bar, and going with an Axe off hand doesn’t really help much either. Using the Elite of the Dragon or Assassin stances is not really all too effective either, as it “only” does half the bar roughly.
This is honestly a horribly designed challenge that doesn’t seem to have been given proper thought (or testing) making sure that everyone can actually do it. I run a physical DPS build with my Revenant; all Ascended Berserker, Strength Runes, Force and Air Sigils, every slot has an +9 Infusion with +5 Precision — there’s ridiculous amounts of Gold invested in this set, but it feels impossible to use it for this challenge (just like it basically were impossible to use for the previous achievements in this mission, Precision Blade and Hold the Line.. I had to rely on cheesy tactics by exploiting that a certain friendly NPC can’t die and not engaging myself. That is not fun. That feels cheap, because it is; just as cheap as the insane damage increase the later waves had). I am certainly not having fun trying to get this achievement done. I am getting frustrated. Annoyed. I want to punch something, someone. The achievement is making me boil with anger.
Stuff like this makes me regret that I bought the new expansion. I can only imagine similarly terrible challenges that aren’t doable without specific classes and gear throughout the expansion areas. How fun that’ll be.. It makes me question why I returned to the game. I was frustrated on several occasions in the past before I took my rather long hiatus from the game. Why would it ever change. It’s gotten worse.
PS: I got the Self-Doubt to about 20%, a couple times. But the cooldowns at that point were all going to last for over FOUR minutes due to the condition and frequent Chill application, so the Alacrity at 25+ stacks practically doesn’t help at all. The Self-Doubt also deals higher damage and there is absolutely no way to kite it effectively. Being downed followed shortly thereafter. If the auto-attack weren’t put on a cooldown, then this would likely be doable, then I could at least get some proper burst done when stunning the Self-Doubt. But alas, it gets affected.
