Looking for raid tips on Esianti: Contract of War

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Fian, Oct 8, 2019.

  1. Allayna Augur

    We have more knights than warriors. We definitely went into Stratos add tanking with knights. On fire, arguably the hardest part of that event is the snails....paladins tanked them for the first 4 months at least. Smoke trial was warrior initially on the mephits, but now, we have found knights to have better survivability when clerics need to run while we burn down the mob up top.

    Those are all T1 raids. We obviously beat them on launch in full RoS gear.

    Lianeb also left out on Esianti that it is a balance event that is drastically harder when "drastically out of balance". We found that using the mobs weaknesses we would have melee standing around with attack off because we would push the mobs out of balance. This was another reason for our swap of melee and caster dps.

    Something that we obviously have to our advantage in our guild is the amount of AE healing. Our shaman alliance each other's groups and the MT. We also have 4-5 shaman twin splashing on refresh. 5 Paladins splashing. A boat load of clerics on launch. If a mid-tier isn't using alliance, that is a huge loss of AE healing and the most common thing I see when we run open raid TBL for Xegony.


    On our first Esianti win - because it's a race, we used paladin sacrifice for those cures on the bird, by the next cycle we had a better strat that Cadira outlined pretty clearly.

    I know most in MS are pretty open to offering help if you have questions, feel free to PM one of them.
    Arraden and Zunnoab like this.
  2. Bigstomp Augur

    Warriors shine when we have at least 2, maybe 3-4 healers looking at us.
    Then our extra mitigation matters.
    The truly hard hitting stuff.

    On stuff that is not that brutal, look at your knights. They're actually easier to heal until you hit that warrior threshold.

    For the event: I (personal opinion) think Sunshine is easy bordering on trivial. Fog if his pathing isn't stupid is 2nd easiest. And Feather is the hardest.

    You for sure want charmers near feather, and depending on raid makeup adding an extra tank to help with the adds that spawn can be useful. Balance/Mechanics > DPS. So funny groups are ok if needed.
    Allayna and Zunnoab like this.
  3. Bigstomp Augur


    This cannot be overstated.
    While you still need healing for the tanks, alliance is huge.
    It's not that uncommon for a warrior to lead the heal parse on some events.
    Healers heal the warrior, warrior heals the raid.
    Arraden, Allayna and Zunnoab like this.
  4. Brohg Augur

    We did use warriors to tank Reparm.

    It's been our strat since our first win to have a shadowknight tank the two Throne Guardians. A (1) shadowknight - the two (2) Throne Guardians. "Loose" warriors would help tag them on spawn to not come trample & dot up the raid, but the SK would just take over the second one when we got it to him, if he didn't already have both out the gate. Not having multiple tanks bobbling around separately for position, and getting to concentrate heals on the one tank was a much cleaner way to handle those than to divide them up. The SK in question really ought to know his business as regards disc rotation, of course.
    Elyssanda, Bigstomp and Zunnoab like this.
  5. Whulfgar Augur

    So 1 Sk tanked both throne guardians? Same time ?
    Allayna likes this.
  6. Brohg Augur

    yes, much less messy encounter that way.

    Oh, gear was brought up. Warriors buncha lifers, full Scaleborn from RoS. RoS raid all around, but lots of Phlogiston on the SK visibles since we didn't go back to farm EoK. They had Reparm 1h weapons real fast, though, we had a lucky run of those early.
    Zunnoab and Whulfgar like this.
  7. Zunnoab Augur

    It is interesting the different setups that are possible. To be clear, I didn't mean we don't use knights to tank things at all. I was just surprised by the extent others have from day one. I'm aware a certain lurker in this thread was likely thinking "I told you so."

    I admit I audibly laughed on the bus reading about one SK tanking both snails.

    The difficulty to balance when exploiting the weaknesses was interesting to read about too. I think this is probably a good example of a fight not designed too rigidly, at least compared to some others.
    Allayna likes this.
  8. Cadira Augur

    Sithsonn (sk) has often tanked both guardians at the same time on open raids. He's kinda a monster.
    Brohg and Allayna like this.
  9. Arraden Augur

    if you get a point where you have one healer that has to cure more than two in same group (for corruption), cleric should be able to take it:

    geomantra, quick cast corruption cure, beacon of life / Focused celestial regen / syllable of mending, quick cast cure.

    Also make sure chanters are casting glyph spray.
    And, has been pointed, plenty of AE healing from splash and alliance.
  10. yosco Augur


    #4 SK serverwide (ranked by AC) ... /yawn

    Not exactly representative of the reality 99% of guilds live in, but impressive nonetheless.
  11. Mintalie Augur

    I think the salient point there was open raids, i.e. not with the force of MS behind him.
    Cadira likes this.
  12. Brohg Augur

    gonna ignore my boy doing it in Phlogiston? okay, passing right by that then
    Cadira and Allayna like this.
  13. Allayna Augur

    Sithsonn also came to us group geared. He's a badass fo sho. I'd say this thread has turned into more of a look at what's wrong with warriors though...
    Whulfgar likes this.
  14. Brohg Augur

    You stay the hell away. Warriors are the very best in game at having their hands held crossing the street and that suits us (well, me) just fine.
  15. Fintank Augur

    Is there something wrong with warriors from a tanking perspective? We can also tank both guardians at the same time :(
    kizant likes this.
  16. sojero One hit wonder


    I think we need to call Ciclee in to take a look at warriors!
  17. yosco Augur


    That wasn't exactly the most clearly articulated sentence on the planet, so I glossed over it. Apologies to your SK friend's ego.
  18. Zunnoab Augur

    I don't think many here are saying the results with the exceptional knight examples are typical. It's just interesting it is possible.

    The danger comes if they nerf and tune based on those fringe cases.
  19. CrazyLarth Augur

    each raid we have to find a new spot middle of the 3 raid mobs to plant the Empowered Banner yes it can cover all three raid mobs usually.

    we changed the AT's so we raid see when to move away from the old spot

    Bird we changed the AT so groups can see if their groups have more then one person needing the cure - group cure or Single cures loaded.

    this raid has levels getting out of synic of the % will make it go to a new level making the raid harder

    100% -
    50% -
    20% -

    you can create a roaming group to fix raid mobs out of balance.

    creating the correct make up of groups for the raid split of 3 raids

    create the groups thinking about the 20% part that means more curers at the bird?
    move mores at the FOG

    we tried to put two curers in each group at the bird
  20. Moldar Augur

    So I play a Shaman on this particular event and my particular team only has 2 Paladins and 3 Shamans.

    The raid force splits the raid up as normal, but the Paladins are split on the "radiant fog / dude" boss, and the Shamans are split evenly among all of the bosses. Thus "feather / the bird" has 0 Paladins and 1 Shaman in that area.

    Essentially our team uses Bards to cure the corruption debuff off of the debuff members and we assign 1 additional cleric to that area of the raid to solely cure folks (usually they are in the tank group which looks roughly like War 1, War 2, Sk 1, Clr 1, Clr 2, Clr 3 (curer)

    I am usually the Shaman that is placed on Feather so my Bard partner on this uses Aria of Absolution to cure the folks in our group as well (additionally the other Bards in the other groups minus the tank group as also curing, with the curing Cleric responsible for keeping the main group cured and assisting the DPS groups with any curing they may need). The main reason the Shaman cannot cure is because they only have group cures and require 2+ casts (depending can sometimes be more depending if they get hit again) to cure without any healing support, usually by this time If I was solo healing the group was dead or dying and the Bard curing and me focusing on Splashing and assisting with healing as necessary. In addition to this I am constantly applying Shaman Alliance to everyone over there (including the DPS groups) but the main focus for Alliance is the 3 tanks, the curing cleric, and all of the healers myself included. essentially this allows the curer to also help AoE heal along with me. I save healing cooldowns such as Spiritual Blessing for whenever the Bosses get out of balance as that is usually when I need my single and group specific heals to be at their best (keeping in mind Splash can only crit 40% of the time best case scenario). Additionally Shamans have a neat little trick called "Fulkitcher Weave" which is a clicky that can be used to prevent any corruption style spell for completely being resisted once every 5, 3.75, or 2.5 minutes depending on the rank of the spell you have. This works surprisingly well especially if the bosses get out of balance and the Debuff starts coming out more often.

    The only other suggestion is like others have mentioned to keep healers with single target corruption cure to help cure over there (primarily this is going to be Clerics and Druids for the priests), but if you have extra Paladins they are able to single-target cure, and Bards can be used to help as well.