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The original was posted on /r/guildwars2 by /u/unkaputtbar_ on 2024-11-15 19:30:12+00:00.

Hey fellow redditors,

only about 2.5 weeks after Thief, we finished the 9th and last Profession stacking kill in Harvest Temple Challenge Mode. To be fair, we started with Elementalists already roughly a year ago, but stopped shortly after cause we were lacking interest. Not this time around though, we managed to quickly overcome Soo-Won with a fiery blast (pun intended).

Before going into the details for Elementalists, I want to first mention a few aspects and key insights around these Profession stacking runs. Note that this is quite a wall of text, so if you aren't interested in Story time and just want to see the Elementalist stuff, scroll past the following list.

1. Engineers: It took us over 2 years to finish this. Of course, we were not constantly progressing this. Usually it was contentrated over a few weeks, followed by a break. Our very first Engineer wipes were on the 20th August 2022. Engineer was Meta back then, with the prevailing Rifle Power Mechanist as oppressive dps machine. We managed to complete Engineers on the 2nd of September. Engineer was the logical entry point, since HAM and Power Mech were Meta and Quickness Scrapper also relatively strong. Only after this kill, was the idea of doing all Profession runs really reinforced and I could not have imagined everything that this wonderful journey entailed.
2. Mesmers: After Engineers, we first picked up Revenant, but then dropped it in favour of Mesmer. Mesmer back then was in a completely different state. There was no proper healing spec for Mesmer yet and some of the crucial boons, like Protection were almost completely missing (only from Shield 4). There was also no Weapon Mastery, so Chrono had no access to dagger. The Might output was also not that great, outside of Mirage, which is not strong in HTCM anyways, due to it being condition focussed. All of this turned out to be quite the pain, especially for progressing the Zhaitan phase, which is the phase with the most incoming damage spikes. The semi-rng for the Protection from Shield 4 Phantoms and the inavailability of a proper healer made this quite tricky. Eventually, we ended up playing with 4 (!) "Healers" (picking the few traitlines/traits that had some small group healing on them and 6 dps. We started at the end of October 2022 and only finished at the start of February 2023, while usually playing roughly once a week!
3. Revenant: We picked Revenant back up in the middle of February and finished one month later. Most notably: Revenant was the first stack run without Invisibility. We spent a lot of time experimenting and figuring out how the enemy AI actually works. During this, we realised how we can essentially "control" when adds start casting their spells (Giants) as well as their movement (Kralk Crabs). The hypothesis, so far, goes as follows: Giants starts their cast based on some internal server ticks if an enemy is in range. Since our position is always the same, the speed with Giants run toward the group directly impacts when they start casting. Notably, if you don't have Invisibility, you want Swiftness on your Squad, but no Superspeed. Since Giants (and enemies in general) copy the movement speed of a randomly targeted player, this means you can control when they start casting their AoE attack. With Superspeed, they were faster in range and the supposed server tick would cause them to initiate their AoE attack at range, compared to Giants running up to our melee range when we had only Swiftness. This knowledge was crucial, also for the subsequent stack runs that had no access to Invisibility. For the Kralkatorrik crabs, we similarly learned, that you can run behind them and they will try to run away in front of you. In this way, you can steer them toward the middle and then CC and quickly dispose of them. Other notable things for Revenant were that we made use of Mallyx for AoE Boonstrips of adds and that we also had a dedicated dps Herald that boonstripped the boss with Shiro F2 active. It was actually kind of nice to use the different tools that Revenant has that are not really ever used in cookiecutter Meta builds. Something else we also did was play the Champions in a different way: We killed Goliath on its spawn point and kited Obliterator away. We did this because of the lacking Invisibility. Only in later runs did we find out, that you can also play the Champions stacked together relatively well without Invisibility.
4. Guardian: We started in the beginning of April 2023 and finished end of April. The special thing we did for Guardians was that we used only Norns. Many of us had to create a new character, we leveled, did dungeons and farmed Hero Points together, which was an awesome part of the journey for this kill. We used Norn specifically for the "Become the Snow Leopard" Elite skill which had Stealth on one of its skills, allowing us to still use Invisibility (this wouldn't have worked with Revenants, since they cannot use racial Elite skills). Other then that, Guardians was pretty straightforward and relatively easy, which is evident also by only half the pulls needed to complete this. The reason for this is the massive access to Stability, which can cover a lot of mistakes that otherwise would have maybe led to wipes, the large amount of AoE dmg, which made dealing with intermissions and add management easy, the access to good CC, ranged skills and projectile blocks, which made Orb phases easy enough. Finally, specifically on Willbender, you can block the incoming damage from Zhaitan Fear completely by using Willbender heal skill, which is awesome. The only annoying part was having boonstrips only accessible via Sigils.
5. Necromancer: We started with Necros in the middle of May 2023 and finished a week after. We once again cut the pulls needed in half, which I'd say is for two reasons: 1) the experience we had gained already in dealing with the mechanics somewhat handicapped and 2) Necromancer, or specifically Reaper, being very strong at that time for HTCM (and still is pretty good to this date). Heal Alacrity Scourge didn't exist back then, so we played this without any Alacrity and used the Quick Harbinger as sort of Healers. The heal they do is nothing compared to a proper healer, but it was good enough for providing lots of boons and the little bit of healing we needed. The good thing with having so many Reapers was that they are pretty tanky and can use their Shroud 3 to mitigate a lot of damage, which removed the need for lots of heals. We used one Scourge specifically to have Sandswell Portal to quickly cover distances, which is nice, even though Scourge itself doesn't deal that much damage. During Necromancer stack, we realised that you can also play the Champions in the last phase easily without Stealth. As long as you don't hit them immediately, they will run toward you and only then start casting their spells. This made stacking them in the boss hitbox and cleaving everything down pretty straightforward. Since Reaper also has so much available burst, we disposed of the Goliath so quickly, that it didn't even cast their Ice Field. We also transmogged ourselves to pink Necro princesses, which was fun :)
6. Warrior: Started in the beginning of June, finished a week after. Warriors was another stack run with a pretty swift progression and not that many wipes. This was the first and only stack run, where we used every Elite Spec + Core! It was before the Banner rework, so Core Warrior kited and gave Quickness with Banners. This also meant we didn't have any Alacrity. We used a Spellbreaker to strip boons and otherwise had Bladesworn and Berserker to pump dps. The only "new" thing we did in this run was that we didn't have much projectile block at all and played the whole Orb 4 (except for the ending) without projectile block. This just means a slower played phase and at first getting accustomed to paying more attention to the orbs, but other then that it wasn't a big deal. Since Bladesworn has such great burst damage, we also managed to burst down the Goliath on the spot without seeing its Ice Field.
7. Intermediate: We started initially with Thief at the start of July 2023, but dropped it middle of August after lacking interest. After a brief trial of Elementalist in September 2023, we went back to Thief during November, but ended up dropping it again and following had a longer break from those runs.
8. Ranger: Started beginning of April 2024, ended a week after. This was by far the quickest and smoothest run out of all professions. The reason is that Ranger has an answer for pretty much all mechanics, great burst and even vast amounts of Stability access with stance share and Dolyak Stance. What also helped is that most people had already played one of the specs before, so it really was just getting in tune with some of the Ranger specific things, like placing and combo blasting the Smoke Field for Invisibility. Similarly to the two runs before, Soulbeast has such great burst, that we killed Goliath on the spot again.
9. Thief: For the third time, we picked Thieves up in the beginning of July 2024. We didn't do any more runs until way past Summer and eventually finished at the end of October 2024. It's safe to say that Thief was the most uncomfortable stack run that we did. On paper, it sounds like Thief has everything: Portal, blinks, Boonstrip, Invisibility, large amounts of CC and good boons. However, what Thief is lack...

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