Grand Court Sebelkeh Hard Mode Guide

This video doesn't actually provide anything useful outside of pausing halfway up the initial pathway to allow the Margonites to ball, and even then you haven't made that obvious in any way. All this video demonstrates is you steamrolling through content with what appears to be garden variety hero meta bars, which is of very little interest or use. This mission is a noob trap (and probably my most favourite in NF because of it) and if you want to help people get through it it's imperative to explain why: an absence of offence is as much a problem as an absence of defence. In most PvE situations you can get through with team builds that are weighted heavily towards defence - builds with an anemic offence don't get punished outside of things going slowly, which isn't obvious to people if they haven't seen what a properly balanced team can do. This is not the case in Grand Court of Sebelkah (and, not incidentally, the other major noob trap Thunderhead Keep) as the constant stream of enemies forces you to keep up offensively, and if you don't you'll eventually get overwhelmed even with a loaded defence. What people often do in this situation is think "well, we died, so obviously we need more healers" and then drop a damage dealer for another monk, which then makes things worse. It's the responsibility of the backline to keep people alive, but what people neglect is that the offence in turn has a responsibility to kill things in a timely manner, hence the THK Monk strike in 2005. Oftentimes you can remove defense from a team build and the survivability doesn't drop because the damage you include in its place more than makes up for it. Killing things is always the best means of keeping your team alive. I've seen people, even in normal mode, running four backliners. Again, an absence of offence is as much a problem as an absence of defence.

Quote from Marty Silverblade

This video doesn't actually provide anything useful outside of pausing halfway up the initial pathway to allow the Margonites to ball, and even then you haven't made that obvious in any way. All this video demonstrates is you steamrolling through content with what appears to be garden variety hero meta bars, which is of very little interest or use. This mission is a noob trap (and probably my most favourite in NF because of it) and if you want to help people get through it it's imperative to explain why: an absence of offence is as much a problem as an absence of defence. In most PvE situations you can get through with team builds that are weighted heavily towards defence - builds with an anemic offence don't get punished outside of things going slowly, which isn't obvious to people if they haven't seen what a properly balanced team can do. This is not the case in Grand Court of Sebelkah (and, not incidentally, the other major noob trap Thunderhead Keep) as the constant stream of enemies forces you to keep up offensively, and if you don't you'll eventually get overwhelmed even with a loaded defence. What people often do in this situation is think "well, we died, so obviously we need more healers" and then drop a damage dealer for another monk, which then makes things worse. It's the responsibility of the backline to keep people alive, but what people neglect is that the offence in turn has a responsibility to kill things in a timely manner, hence the THK Monk strike in 2005. Oftentimes you can remove defense from a team build and the survivability doesn't drop because the damage you include in its place more than makes up for it. Killing things is always the best means of keeping your team alive. I've seen people, even in normal mode, running four backliners. Again, an absence of offence is as much a problem as an absence of defence.

Wow, extremely well said Marty. I agree with all of what you said, and in a way, I kinda miss the variety of olden days...
Something that can also be exiting is that you try to build your own herobuilds, or take a 7 hero team build and modify it - swap out some heroes, add in new ones and try out things.
It's not because it's meta that it's the only way - meta is good for most situations, but you can vary things according to your own style: if you're more offensive, throw out some defensive heroes. Add in the explosive stuff, but know what you're doing.

Meta makes things really dull..

More on topic, I never really had an issue with the Grand Court, but that's mainly because my characters are all setup to be quite offensive: e.g. a AoE warrior, an assassin, a ritualist and a necro. All in all, they all deal out quite a lot of damage, though some of them are quite slower in killing.
The Grand Court is super-easy if you burn down the enemies fast enough, the issue lies in getting overwhelmed, pulling too many foes at once. It's really a well-designed mission in that if you know how it works, it becomes very easy. If you're trying to rush it, well... you might not have the best time.

Reminds me of a mission that I used to have quite a lot of problems with, but that was a month after Factions came out and I wasn't really a good player back then... That mission by the way was Zen Dajiun. Was such a pain for me back then...