Wait…you can’t choose it’s stats when you make it?
I don’t know. I may be wrong about that part.
It’s tedious, but basically you need: 1) Decent damage 2) Decent survivability 3) Ability to mind your surroundings.
Ground quake knockback/fear can be avoided if you dodge before it goes off. Fear bubbles can be destroyed, effectively negating most fears and the knockback/fire from the orbs that spawn from them.
Mender guy is easiest to manage if you have some movement-based CC – knockbacks, pulls, roots, etc.
I was running mesmer sword/focus & greatsword, so I had sword 3 root and gs 5 knockback. The knockback doesn’t actually push him back (just knocks him down for a sec) but it’s still helpful.
Managing all of those factors makes it kind of tedious for one player though. If anything, I would say tweak down the HP of the statue a bit. Unless you’re going around annihilating everything, you don’t get a lot of clean DPS time on the statue.
The currency sinks in this game are unreal. Your choices are: 1) Run around farming nonsense for a single backpiece or 2) Buy basically everything.
But honestly, the main part that bugs me is that the update text is a bit deceiving. “Begin construction of a new back item which will grow and change as your adventures continue in Episodes 3 and 4” makes me think that the game is going to give you what you need through the story.
Instead, you get a few enticing pieces and a fun little run-around-the-world scavenger hunt, followed by realizing that the pieces you just changed are only the base components of numerous recipes requiring a lot of farming that has little to do with the story quests.
In other words, unless you want to spend hours and hours farming or spend all of your gold to buy components for one back piece, you realize that you just (potentially) wasted all of that time with their little mini-game to get nothing.
I mean, by the current prices I’ve seen, if you bought all of the crafted components, you could easily spend over 100 gold. 100+ gold worth of farming for one skin with stats that you may not even want. When I put it in perspective like that, it’s extremely off-putting game design. I don’t expect handouts, but I expect item acquisition to be fun once in a while.