Dealing with melee aoe monsters

justice4

I have a question for you all! When I am doing group content, or even some solo things, the one thing that I have the most trouble with by far is the monsters that have aoes centered around themselves (the ones that drop the red circles at their feet, basically). How do most of you deal with them? I find that usually they cast them so much that I basically just dodge, go back in and hit them once or twice, dodge, hit them once, etc. It makes for very slow killing though! I do use cloud of steel to boot, but once it's out of daggers it kind of stops dpsing very well lol.

gunman

Solo:
- stealth makes mobs stand still, abuse that and kill everything;
- Lurker's Assault (daily) makes you stay at least 10 seconds in invisibility (but you can stealth -> wait for it to run out -> Lurker -> keep DPS even after it has ended, you should be at a full bar that needs to run out) which should be enough to toast any solo boss

Group:
- dodge, focus on the non-self-AoE mobs
- if the only mobs left are these above mentioned ones, sneak a few hits in-between their casts; rely on those CWs to help bring it down

As a personal preference, use Bait and Switch to charge you daily (leave the shadow in the AOE) and punish the mob/boss with it.

xantris

justice4 wrote: »

I have a question for you all! When I am doing group content, or even some solo things, the one thing that I have the most trouble with by far is the monsters that have aoes centered around themselves (the ones that drop the red circles at their feet, basically). How do most of you deal with them? I find that usually they cast them so much that I basically just dodge, go back in and hit them once or twice, dodge, hit them once, etc. It makes for very slow killing though! I do use cloud of steel to boot, but once it's out of daggers it kind of stops dpsing very well lol.

Disorients (dazing strike, smoke bomb) and Impossible to Catch. Just stagger them to create a chain. Disorients generally don't work on bosses though, so I'll switch something out for something that give me more mobility or Utility, like Deft Strike or Wicked Reminder.

justice4

Ok cool, thanks for the advice. For solo, how do you keep the monsters from going after your companion when you stealth? I stealth but it doesn't help much in regards to aoes since they're still attacking and aoeing my companion, and a lot of that ends up hitting me if I don't dodge frequently.

imathil

Not much you can do about your companion. Usually my cleric spends most of the boss fights down waiting to be revived. Hopefully they will release the companion training tomes soon. The founder's panther pretty much sucks in fights too, my strategy has been to hope that the pets attract some aggro and use them as a "wall" for combat advantage from stealth intermittently to thin the spawns out as I dodge (run) away from the boss.