kendro1200

Nikephoros, on 09 May 2013 - 02:17 PM, said:

That's true for fractals where there are high levels of play where everything must be min/max, and it's more a question of what players can do to give themselves a little extra push, and survivability is largely thrown out the window because if you get hit you're dead anyways.  In all other explorables boon and condition manipulation can be very important.  TA & HotW are good examples of this, conditions to remove off party members, boons to strip off enemies.
Fractals was a really cool idea, but sadly a couple profession mechanics kinda screwed it into something stupid rather than be something super cool that inspired creativity and build diversity to overcome problems.

draxynnic, on 02 May 2013 - 11:55 PM, said:

They were originally more Japanese, a big wandering samurai (samurai and ninjas are Japanese, ninjas being a blanket term for skilled thieves and spies) theme was going on with them, coupled with an isolated island where few were allowed to enter or leave, with a heavy zen outlook on life.  In MoP everything samurai was ditched and the brewmaster was adjusted to be more of a drunken brawler.  Samwise did the original artwork and doodles that generated the Pandaren, but he didn't know that pandas don't naturally exist in Japan, and so he drew samurai pandas.

Bloodtau, on 06 May 2013 - 07:30 PM, said:

They aren't really, other countries just like to throw fits when Americans (and "Westerners" in general) do any kind of portrayal of their culture.  They'll throw fits because we react to the fits and try to make them stop.  They don't throw fits when others do it because the others don't attempt to fix something that wasn't a problem in the first place.


Like I've said though, Anet should really just push forward with Cantha, it's not like not-doing-it will win them anymore people.  I'm sure there are a good chunk of people who are exclusively interested in just playing a ritualist that didn't transition over because there was no good substitute for ritualist in GW2 as it is currently.  Sure various professions can fill a damage/support role, but the thematics and mechanics of how it's done isn't the same.

As Dollorian has mentioned, swap lich for plague.  Plague is better when trying to be "tanky"
Swap your weapon sigils from leeching to energy.
Also swap greater marks for staff mastery.  You can drop mark of blood a couple times on yourself per weapon cooldown, and keep perma regen up on yourself.

That's my thoughts at least.  Personally I'd switch the soldier gear for cleric, no real reason to have an insanely high health pool unless someone else is feeding your the hps to make use of it.  If you switch to cleric though and thus increase your own healing, you can then just force feed yourself healing to counteract most incoming damage.  Granted the high health pool with high armor does make your death shroud extremely durable, it's a personal preference kind of thing I guess.

draxynnic, on 07 May 2013 - 01:28 AM, said:

It's not that bad, when you now what you're going to swap to you can do it right after combat drops and on the way to the next fight.  Granted I wish I could macro all of the swaps so I could push a button and swap everything at once, but meh, 3 seconds isn't too bad.

So for funzies I decided to try out this build over the weekend in a handful of dungeons to see if it fixed an issue I wasn't quite fond of in explorable dungeons with a power build, namely the squishy'ness.  The squishy'ness was never a huge problem in your regular form because you could weave in and out of deathshroud to keep yourself up, but when you hopped into lich, if something sneezed as you, you fell over.  This build looked to counter that lich form squishy'ness and also increase lich form burst.  From my experience it worked EXTREMELY well, I could face tank quite a number of things and in lich form I was damn near invincible.  Probably wouldn't work too well in some of the fractals with jumping (because of pathing problems), but meh, most other places it worked extremely well.  You just had to use the basic tricks to make sure minions attacked what you wanted and not open with unholy feast.  On certain boss fights the minions did need to get ditched and traits had to be swapped, but I really had no qualms with that.  I swapped out traits for stuff more team orientated and just had to play with a more cautious mentality because I didn't have minions to heal up my mistakes.
Certain trash packs I wouldn't even let bone minions hang out for their full duration, I just simply used them on cooldown for their explosion damage and blast combos.