User:Shard/Dhuum
The first two tries I made to get to Dhuum, my team died to the four horsemen. Like any determined group, we tried a second time, and died at the same place. Then we said "fuck it" and brought a shadow form tank. We actually beat all the UW quests in a little over an hour, and were standing in front of King Frozenwind, ready to press on against Dhuum.
We all accepted the quest, put up our consumables, and ran into the Hall of Judgment. Dhuum. Looks. Awesome. Too bad about that lung cancer he must have from all the radioactive smoke spewing out of his neck. We stood in front of him for about 2 minutes and taunted him before he did anything, at which point we started owning him.
When you get to Dhuum, there's a red quest bar that goes up. Now, you have to realize, nowhere in the game dialogue (not even in King Frozenwind's quest dialogue) does it tell you what to do. So we did what any group does in Guild Wars - big domages. We did this for about 2 minutes before realizing he was just getting fully healed every time he disappeared. We ended up guessing that we had to pretend like we were in a searing flames group and spam skill 1 on recharge until the red quest bar got to full.
I should mention now that when you die, you turn into a ritualist. You have a heal, an imba damage spell, Arbiter Stasis, DP-Away, and a skill that makes the red quest bar go up. Unlike every other boss battle in the game, this quest bar is supposed to go up, and when it gets to the top, it doesn't mean you lose.
That red quest bar should be a part of "The Waiting Game" because that's all you end up doing while it fills up. When the red bar got all the way up - nothing happened. I wish there would have been a "KILL DHUUM NOW!" message that popped up, so we didn't waste another minute using that spell, thinking it was close to full, but not quite there yet. Of course, not being mind readers, we didn't know what arenanet wanted us to do after dhuum got his rest, so we did what any team in GW would do - moar domages. This time, it worked. Mashing the '3' button repetitively was a refreshing change from mashing the '1' button repetitively.
During the battle, Dhuum periodically does some annoying things. He uses Aura of the Lich, Searing Flames, Scythe attacks, Conjure Nightmare, and Icy Shackles. Of course, no power-crept boss in GW is complete without a shadow step that has no recharge.
Joking aside, the battle was interesting. This interest died after the first 5 minutes of doing the same thing over and over again. In Zelda games, if a boss takes a long time to kill, it's because it has multiple stages or layers, and each one has a particular strategy you need to utilize to kill it. In addition, each stage or layer has a short lifespan, so you only have to repeat your actions a few times before moving on to the next stage or layer of that boss. Dhuum needs more of that. Stage 1 was "use skill 1 on recharge" and stage 2 was "use skill 3 on recharhe" Each of these took us 10-15 minutes. The last 20 minutes of this battle was filled with complaints from Yasmin about how long and boring the battle is, followed by contrasts between Guild Wars and Zelda, then by contrasts between Guild Wars and The Sims, then by parts of GhostBusters that still make her laugh after watching it 100 times. To be honest, I wanted Dhuum to hurry up with the dying because I thought she was going to talk about Simon Le Bon for half an hour. Actually, her endless ranting was probably the only thing keeping everyone in vent from gouging their eyes out.
When we finally killed him, our teammates woke up and walked over to the chest. We all got crap, but we just attributed that to the Anti-Shard Loot System Anet put in place a while ago.
Looking back, some of us were disappointed that the builds we brought to UW had no impact on Dhuum (the spirit bars kill him much more quickly), so basically they made this battle as lame as Ursanway. Everybody gets the same skills, nobody specializes in anything. The only person who didn't die was our paragon, mainly because she was a paragon. She was busy spamming TNTF and SY while the rest of us were running in circles using channeled strike on Dhuum. This negates the point of having a game with multiple professions. The battle was so long and boring, I won't ever do it again until they change something about it. It's not hard, and it's not a badly designed battle, it's just too damn tedious.
Here's what I would have done to make this encounter less boring, but still keeping with the awesomeness of getting to fight a god:
- Either have more stages, or have each stage take waaaaaay less time to complete.
- Have spirit skills specific to whatever profession that player was playing on.
- Have a way for players to come back after dying (other than scrolls)
- Make the reapers less pathetic. They look almost as cool as Dhuum, yet they suck ass just as much.
- Give him minions that aren't the average "attack closest enemy" melee weenies. Give him Bodyguards or some other support caster so your team actually has something to do.
- Balance Underworld around balanced team builds, not around Shadow Form. Some of the quests are nearly impossible to complete without one Shadow Form tank (it's the new ursan). I'll draw you a chart sometime so you can see exactly how balancing between game components works.
Basically, make Dhuum's battle more like this guy's.
Bottom line: Dhuum looks badass, and the battle was kinda fun at the beginning, but it lasts waaaay too long, and everyone is forced to run the same thing or to kill dhuum slower kill themselves out of boredom.
