Throne of the Dead is un PUGable

Just FYI buff troller makes the biggest difference out of those 3 things. It buffs up the damage of everyone in the group constantly so yea you did use the meta,my complains were not about difficulty but the length it took to defeat areas if you dont have a buff troll or other meta things to speed it up.

I can agree with that but they need to set the way bar lower if they wanna do timing based damage checks,what i hope for is for them to design the elite raid content to counter the meta.

Skill regardless of roll is about mechanics to me and then how well do you play aka roll checks.

I know you're talking about powerset pets (including RSK), but related to this I'm actually shocked at how many scenarios I've been in where I've discovered that elite players whom I've ran multiple elite raids with don't carry a ST turret pet and AOE turret pet in their inventory. Honestly, the majority of times I've seen people use them haven't even been times that call for them and it was more like that was just their pet of choice in general. I remember the first week of Metal II I was in a semi-league PCe run and we were having trouble consistently burning the Lady Blackhawk adds before the portal phase. I finally said "I'm not walking back in to that room until every one of you goes to the Metal I vendor or pops a broker bot and buys a Snake turret! They're 50 source marks or about $30-$40M on the broker. I know most if not all of you have hundreds of millions and/or 500+ source marks. Do it now!" After 3 minutes of whining and BSing.... Me: "you would have been back by now. I'm not F'in around, go now!" lol

I guess the point is to encourage strategic burn. I agree that over-all burn-centric boss fights are pretty lame but I also think it's lame to simplify the burn aspect down to "as long as 'action' based mechanics are properly executed all the DPS gotta do is hit some buttons in between and all will be good".

FGSe Grail and PCe Lady Blackhawk were great examples of mechanics where strategic burn greatly benefitted the group. The Grail fight in particular was one lots of groups, even supposed OPest of the OP groups struggled. My league (after sorting it all out over the first couple weeks) always beat it within 1-3 tries because we knew when an add phase was coming up (because they were health based) and we literally just stopped ALL burn and waited for the time based mind-control phase, got everyone out of mind control and then proceeded to burn to proc the add phase. The added waiting time also probably helped allow some things to come off cooldown so we could quickly annihilate the adds. Smart, controlled, focused burn was the key. And I promise you that any group of generally elite ready/capable players would have had enough burn to beat grail regularly with that strategy.

Now, were there lots of times where groups still beat it just going all out with top tier meta power & LO burn, popping everything off cooldown ASAP? Of course. But I guarantee you over the course of 10 runs, 20 runs, 50 runs, whatever, groups that used that approach didn't have any where near the success rate that we had with our strategy.

Now, mechanics like what I just mentioned only more or less highly increase chances of success. They aren't a pass/fail. Outside of reflect phases, there really isn't a mechanic in the game that outright REQUIRES that level of timing, coordination and burn rate management. I personally would like to see that.

I think the grail one was fine because you could still finish the bossfight even without doing the burn but forcing groups to do dps checks means asking for meta and the grail one, most of the groups i played with were not capable of doing the dps check so theres definetly some coordination needed and definetly more skill based then ares dps check and if they tied DPS checks to feats like they did with grail im fine with that

Well there were really two DPS checks. There's the omega one and then the add phases. The Omega one was really just for the feat. The REAL DPS check was killing the adds before the maniac took out half the group and/or another timed mind control phase happened, especially since the tank was guaranteed to get MC'd after the first two. But I promise you, most if not all of those groups you were in could have annihilated the adds with 5-6 orbitals, 5-6 snake (aoe) turrets and all DPS's using their buff trinkets and supercharges before the add phase caused any major problems. Especially so if they waited out a mind-control phase to make sure they didn't overlap.

But the groups that used their pets, supercharges, orbitals, etc just whenever regardless of the phase often struggled to kill the adds and/or wiped when the tank got MC'd with 10+ adds running around. That's where controlled burn and coordinated damage spikes made a world of difference.

But yeah, Ares had too much health. It was a grueling marathon, not a test of skill. But that's not a DPS check mechanic, that's just a stupid high health pool stat.