Soloing with PTS Changes: Vet Stone Garden, Bal Sunnar and Dread Cellar Soloed

Logos

I want to start by saying that I'm fine with raising the floor, and think that it's a good move. Also, I'm not on the forums a ton, so I apologize if the format of this post is incorrect.

I decided to test out this new Esoteric Environment Greaves mythic for solo play. As you will see below I didn't optimize the builds or theory craft too much. I just quickly put things together to test out the items and some of the new changes to classes (mostly templar). Doing this I soloed Veteran Bal Sunnar, Veteran Stone Garde and Veteran Dread Cellar. I only really tried these three as I figured they would be good measures of the item since I'm pretty sure none of these have ever been soloed before? Even if they have, the builds for the first day (Dread/Bal Sunnar) were not great. Still, I died once to the 2nd boss in Dread Cellar and once to a trash pack in Stone Garden. Bal Sunnar had ...some trial and error... Also, I soloed normal Asylum Sanctorum a few months ago, so I took the 2nd day's (Stone Garden) build back in there on PTS to compare, and it was just a joke compared to when I did it on live. The build felt nearly immortal while doing it in nearly the same time.

The point being that this one item clearly makes soloing a lot easier. Which is fine, as I said in the beginning (though I do suspect this level of ease wasn't intended). One issue that this item makes worse though is that challenging solo-specific play was already nearly gone and this will kill it entirely for just about everyone. My Flawless Conqueror title has become less and less meaningful each passing year with mythics and power creep, and will now essentially mean nothing. Again, that is fine except that I have nothing to replace it with. Rewards to incentivize play are way lacking overall, but that's a whole issue in and of itself. For soloing there is no reward for doing anything challenging (and nothing challenging for solo-specific play), while other play types in the game do have titles for reaching certain milestones. I'd prefer time locked titles and real rewards, but I'm not holding my breath. Anything would be nice.

I hope that this endless dungeon system does something to address this. If we are going to have leaderboards, please have one for solo specifically, and please give people some incentive to actually play the content like time-locked rewards, or even just rewards (not gear that you already get from doing the content).

As for the mythic. Is it too strong? Probably. Hyperioxes has a great video covering the mythic and its strength as well. If it does this for solo play though, I'm sure it can be exploited to trivialize group and PvP content as well. Raising the floor is great (genuinely), so long as it doesn't touch the ceiling.

Dread Cellar (Veteran)

After dying once on the 2nd boss I switched to Practiced Incantation so that I could come out of the "red skull phase" with enough stam to survive.

Bal Sunnar (Veteran)

This one wasn't my best. I needed a DK for the 2nd boss and haven't played a DD DK in a while, and I've never been great with it. I ended up switching to Oakensoul on the final boss as I wasn't taking too much damage and it made the fight easier.

Stone Garden (Veteran)

I had only recently done this dungeon for the first time in live and was genuinely surprised how easy this solo run was... except for the werewolf phase ... that was intense solo. This one was done the next day and I optimized the build a bit more. First boss took ~3.5 minutes, 2nd took under 5 minutes.

(I have clips of of these kills as well that I could upload if people are interested)

I'm likely stopping here for now with my solo attempts though. There are plenty of other good soloers to push this mythic even further. If the item gets changed I might revisit it.

-Gutum

SirLeeMinion

After reading your thoughts, I tried this mythic in normal Asylum Sanctorium. It looked like you were using Olorime & Whorl, so I grabbed them and rolled a templar. I went with a 2h + Ice staff with Esoteric greaves and compared that with a shock staff with Oakensoul.

On St. Llothis, I found survivability higher with Esoteric greaves, but damage was lower as compared to Oakensoul. With both setups, it was a battle of attrition, but oakensoul cleared the adds a good deal faster, even with non-optimal sets. With the greaves I found myself managing stam; with oakensoul I found myself managing shields. It didn't seem like either set made the content super easy to solo (though some might argue that it ought not be soloable at all, I suppose).

On St. Felms, my damage was just too low with the greaves to clear the adds before they enraged and ultimately killed me. I'd be curious to see your full build, as it is no doubt better than what I threw together. My first-cut impression, though, is that I sacrificed a fair bit of damage for the survivability. This seemed like a fair trade-of rather than something OP.

Either way, thanks for the heads-up! I'll look forward to fooling with this item more later.

Logos

Don't have much time right now, so I just did Lothis real quick. I can do the rest later if you'd like or do it with a better setup for the fight. You want damage set with daggers front bar (new trial medium monster set would be better, but I used whorl since it was there) + Olo backbar (ice staff for minor breach with susceptibility) for minor aegis and major courage. Roksa + Bear Haunch for recovery. We get the mythic + 1p trainee as well. It's a magicka build with stam as the primary resource.

The only time you should be blocking is to block CC, never damage even enraged they don't do enough damage to come close to killing me. The build would be better with a few things, one of which would be dropping ritual as it wasn't needed, putting degen on back bar and adding purifying light. I only did 3 heavy and 3 medium attacks through the 10 minutes This build is definitely more tanky that it needs to be for this specifically, but still 10m isn't horrible for just logging on.

CMX

Setup

Superstar isn't working on PTS for me...

Edit: Forgot proof of death XD

SirLeeMinion

Thanks!