I want to clarify a few things since a lot of people may still hold the opinion that the kill is somehow not very impressive because they used ranged weapons.
First of all, meleeing Imbued Shaman himself (even at 80) is fairly easy with a small amount of practice, like most slow-hitting bosses. You have, what, two extra attacks to deal with? One of them is a slow cast AoE that you can literally walk out of, and the other is the spinning attack that also gives plenty of time to react.
If we were talking about a boss with fast melee hits, for example Legendary Archdiviner, I would definitely agree that ranging the boss trivializes the fight versus meleeing it. But on Shaman? Nah. It doesn’t even come close to trivializing it. Shaman’s attacks (including melee) are by far the easiest part of the fight.
To say that it’s not much of an accomplishment because they’re using a ranged weapon and thus negating two slow, incredibly easy to dodge attacks is like saying your guild’s Lupicus solo videos don’t show any skill because by meleeing you’re negating several of his main attacks that only hit ranged players.
Let’s face it – the only dangerous part of Imbued Shaman is the add phase, and meleeing the elementals while chaining reflects has zero risk vs. ranging them, since you are fully protected from their attacks anyway. On the [rT] duo 48 kill video, you basically chain Feedback, Phantasmal Warden and Temporal Curtain and then run out and kite the adds until the reflects come off cooldown.
I’m not criticizing this approach, but rather pointing out that there is nothing about this that shows superiority in skill of playing melee vs. ranged. With the protection of reflection abilities, you could essentially put some random terrible player into a Feedback bubble at level 80 and they’d be able to melee with their eyes closed and come out alive.
The real skill in the 80 duo is coordinating and positioning everything for the amount of time it takes to kill the adds (since they have so much health) while removing the boss’s bubble (full groups sometimes even struggle with this), dealing with the lava that appears beneath you and takes most of your health in one tick, and still dodging Agony/surviving the fourteen level 84 adds (who hit for 75% of your health) when you occasionally have to leave the reflect zones because of lava.
When all is said and done, this is a great duo kill and big respect to you for pulling it off.
If meleeing was fairly easy why did they range then?
Also you are missing some major things which makes me believe you really haven’t meleed it. Most importantly when he “spins” you have to react immediately because the attack hits really inconsistently (before circles even appear and outside of them). There might be something I don’t know about this attack so feel free to tell me. One little thing is that you have much less time to avoid his arrow (you have to dodge based on animation instead of dodging when it flies towards you). And finally you have position properly for Firestorm and it’s much easier to take damage from lava.
Yes, we also abused reflections. But there is a big difference between so many anti projectile skills that you can just mindlessly waste them. Also we had to position them bit more carefully because we can’t just keep hitting them at range.
Also I don’t think the lava damage actually scales (not 100% sure but I think I tested it at some point). At least on the video I saw Mesmer getting hit for about 2.5k from an Elemental. That’s about 13% of his health, not 75%.
With the protection of reflection abilities, you could essentially put some random terrible player into a Feedback bubble at level 80 and they’d be able to melee with their eyes closed and come out alive.
According to you with reflects you can just faceroll. So what made this fight so impressive then?
(edited by Wethospu.6437)
