Flame Cursed Sentinels, How do we get past them and gank?

After losing several times on the Fire map today, we started wondering how we could pull of a good gank on this map. Due to the lava and sentinels it is pretty hard (near impossible) to pull off a gank here, but I want to find out how to do so anyway. We did not have enough people interested in running an unrated GvG event to test things out, so I'd figure we could better go theorycrafting here and then get people in 2 Basin guilds to do unrated vs each other to figure out exactly how strong Sentinels are.

Ok, first up: the obvious things.

Cursed Flame Sentinels are level 28 Fire Elementalist creatures. They stand in the middle of a large pool of lava but are not affected by it. Their attacks hurt an awful lot.

They use Flare, Fire Storm, Phoenix and some other skills, according to eye witness reports

Assuming that it gets treated the same way as other elementalists are, it has Level*3 armor level. A level 20 ele has 60 armor, this level 28 one has 84 armor. This is a permanent +24 AL.

Assuming it has health gain equal to player charcters, it will have 80+(28*20) health, which is 640.


We need to assemble a small team that is either able to take down the Sentinels or get past them, then kill 2 bodyguards (possible some archers too) and then the Guild Lord. Time is of the essence for this. The rest of the team should play highly defensive to stall, but you don't have forever. The smaller the team the better.

The most obvious ideas are to either sneak past them using lotsa evasion skills/outhealing them. Or you can kill them and move on.

For the sneak/heal ideas, some skills/combos that seem useful are:
- Protective Bond on a Elementalist primary.
- Protective Spirit on any kind of character.
- Healing Hands in combination with one of the above for virtual invulnerability for a while.
- Spell Breaker. When they can't attack you, you can move through quite easy.
- Mantra of Flame

Killing them can be done if a few ways too:
- Domination mesmer featuring Power Block.
- E-Denial mesmer
- Concussion Shot ranger
- Thunderclap + Air spiker

Brute force build ideas:

[Empathy + Backfire + Power Leak + Power Spike + Power Block] (or something similar) could work as a shutdown caster. Empathy/Backfire will damage him no matter what he does, the first interrupts will prevent big spells and drain some of his energy, Power Block will disable all his skills - he is a Fire Ele for a reason This one has 3 slots left to provide self-healing. Power leak/spike could either be dropped or replaced by Power Drain as well.

Some character build ideas:

Gank supporter

Earth 9+1
Water 11+1+3
Energy Storage 8+1
Protection Prayers 8

Kinetic Armor
Armor of Mist
Reversal of Fortune
Water Trident [Elite]
Maelstrom
Water Attunement
Ward Against Foes
Rez Signet

Put on Kinetic Armor and then Armor of Mist. These 2 together will give you ~90 armor. Run through the Lava, spam Reversal every 4 or 5 seconds to keep your health up. Put the ward at the last lava pool to keep the Sentinels off your tail. This should help you through the lava. At the base, use trident as a spam attack to keep kinetic up and to get some damage done. Maelstrom will be a nice DoT attack that interrupts a bit as well. Signet is for when things go a little wrong.

on a spell spammer (Reversal of Fortune?) will do wonders, too. You'd get +102 armor at Earth/Water 12, witha +33% speed buff. RoF has a fast recharge time and helps prevent damage/heal you.

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Dazer Ranger + Curse/Blood Necro team

One or two Ranger(s) utilizing Concussion Shot to Daze a Sentinel for easy interruption could also work. Take Fire armor to reduce damage taken. Possibly have 2 or 3 of these rangers all pack Flurry/Tiger's Fury or some other attack speed increase and a Short Bow (for fast attack speed) on switch. Ignite Arrows as preparation. I was thinking of adapting the One Man Gank build to fit our need.

Put on Mark of Pain and maybe Barbs on a support necro carrying Lingering Curse and Weaken Armor. LC to partially ignore the Guild Lord's healing trick. It heals for all damage over 50-250 you do (scales up in the first 15 minutes, with 100 damage max at ~6:19) Lingering should (not certain) cut this healing in half. Faster gank ftw! Other skills to take could be blood spiker stuff. (Shadow Strike/Vampiric Gaze/Dark Pact + OoB for energy gain.)

At ~2-3 minutes, we should be able to deal 100-150 max DPS to the GL... That'll kill him in ~12-19 seconds.

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Anyway, these are just some random comments and ideas to get a discussion going on the Flame Cursed Sentinels and how to gank on the Fire map.
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