Fell Foliage group mission difficulty

I have it on farm status but still think it's a bit overpowered for the opening group mission. I used to fail quite a bit but once everyone was in conflagrant and I leveled a cleric alt, it became doable. It helps I have all casters except the paladin tank. I also burn every offensive aa I have in a very specific sequence in order to beat it. I farm it for rk2 spells for the crew but the armor drops are for tribute since I bought the conflagrant to be able to do the mission, hence the reason I think it's a bit overpowered.
End of Empire on the other hand...the bad guys have me on farm status...

True. If you bypass the mechanics by bringing way more dps than they tuned it for its easy as hell.

Yes. Players can do 500k DPS on a burn routinely. There are quite a few classes that can hit or exceed 1 mil DPS with proper support (again, on a burn).

People who understand how to play their class do that.

You must be trolling...please say yes.

I have Fell on farm for both my groups but then I run wizzies/mages for dps and they have an ench to support. Typically I run a cleric merc but I can run a cleric alt if needed. Reality is my pal and sk both tank fine it just comes down to burning the mob. Mage/wizzies basically = simple mission.

While I think FF Is too hard for a progression mission I think EoE is even worse. FF just requires picking up the right DPS classes, EoE is a nightmare in comparison. I haven't beaten it yet but I've optimized my group (dropping necro for 3 mage or 3 wizzy depending on which box group) and need to finish EoK progression before I can try again.

Rotating in wizy/mages on the shamans will help, Good luck with empire though - likely to find that a lot harder.

Fell Foliage is either super easy or super hard, and rarely anywhere in between. If you have enough DPS, it's a joke. Particularly for non-melee DPS. Don't have enough DPS and it's a nightmare.

We had issues earlier (i.e. several months back) with a melee-heavy group.
And even now, a melee-group has a much tougher time that a caster (WIZ/MAGs with ENC) one.
But we've won it recently (pre-patch) with - iirc - WAR,CLR,SHM,ROG,BER,BST (not sure if it was a BST or someone else, not my regular BST for sure though), all live players and no boxes, and won rather easily.
BER was an ALT that got himself killed at the earliest opportunity too - it was the only death.

We've done it again post-patch with WAR+CLRmerc+SHM box, CLR (the WAR didn't trust my healing lol), ROG and BER. WAR tanked easily (never went below 50%), SHM stacked his dots before spot-healing and BER (a main from another guild this time) kept himself alive. The ROG needed the most healing (overheal the DS) but was also the top DPS.

It's still a box-unfriendly mission imo, but not AS bad as it used to be.
2SHM *and* a cleric with a WAR using full defensives... should be more than enough to tank/heal this, even in mostly or only group gear.
If this is a group of live players and not an assortment of boxes, then i have to say try to use more tools that you have. CLR healing, one SHM healing while the other dots, then reversing the two... and the BER watching for the DS debuff should do it, even though the SHM dots aren't exactly "burn" anymore.


For the VP key parts though i would still go for the dedicated key-dropper mobs these days.

bard / beastlord have a better time DPSing this mission than berserker generally, because so much of their damage is non-melee that they get to add in their non-0 melee pretty much for free with a Blood Drinker's Coating, right through the debuff that puts ber in immediate deadly peril. You do have to make the major adjust, though - can't just run the standard linup of fluffing-the-war/ber-dps songs. Amp going in, Shout&Bellow, double Insults & disc up!

Also, while this story is told from your barding perspective -- a minute is completely long enough for shm to be doing good damage, too. If they're healing instead, a job already covered by the cleric, you effectively just have a 4 person group.

The bard class is very capable of putting out decent numbers in a 1 minute burn.

Here are a couple post-nerf parses from April that I could find. Similar group DPS to what Sancus had... 1.8-2 million group DPS looks like a decent target for burning down Cactiikii.

WAR, CLR, BER, RNG, BRD (no 6th)
Cactiikii in 38s, 87755k @2309337 | #3 Bard + pets 17513k@(473317 in 37s)

WAR, CLR, RNG, DRU, BRD, ROG (RNG/DRU boxed, group-geared ROG with just auto-granted AAs)
Cactiikii in 45s, 87797k @1951047 | #3 Bard + pets 21439k@(476428 in 45s)

Mostly still EoK raid-geared at the time.

Activate stuff like fierce eye, epic, and quick time for the group before it spawns and then activate the rest of your burns when Cactiikii spawns so you don't waste any time starting up the burn. Rotate bellow and shout as mentioned already. Run insults.

And yes, group geared people can put out very good burst numbers too. Before this devolves into another whine fest. You just have to know how to push buttons. If you just attack stuff, don't expect much to happen. My newb Zerker has 11k AA, didn't have any raid gear at all until recently and was doing nice burns.

I can only do about 340k over a minute unsupported

You don't even have to burn it. Just kill the stupid sprouts as soon as they spawn. If you're dps is low, don't burn until the first add is dead then blow it up, so your burns are going during the next add or two, then ignore the adds while you finish it. That gets you through like 5 adds in terms of time to kill.

I've done this in full RoI groups that has gone awful and even failed (granted, was back when it was much harder), and it was always due to lazy people just auto attacking and not killing the right things.

You don't need a tracker either. Be spamming /tar a_spr or whatever and as soon as your target switches, go grab it, better yet, have the tank move the boss over to the sprout while the rest are killing it so you lose less dps.

Too many low dps groups try and burn from the top, ignoring sprouts and often adds, trying to get the boss dead before it locks. Then their burns are exhausted and their non-burn dps is barely enough to eat through the existing adds and new adds while they try to get the thing unlocked, then they finally get it unlocked and get back on the named, then another add pops, going into cycles of invul/vuln.

That's the other thing. There is lag between killing a mob and it registering that you are under the limit and resetting his vulnerability. So ping ponging between vuln/invuln is usually a failure with low dps, as you lose 2/3 of the time you could have had. Prioritize adds, then the boss never goes invulnerable, so even when you're on adds you're getting tank dps or pet or dot dps or whatever going too.

From MON after raids:
Combined: Cactiikii in 84s, 92352k @1099423sdps (excluding the monstrous)
--- #1 ROG 39711k@472755sdps (484286dps in 82s) [43%]
--- #2 BER (boxed by SHM) + pets 27434k@326594sdps (330529dps in 83s) [29,71%]
--- #3 WAR (boxing CLR) + pets 14451k@172037sdps (172037dps in 84s) [15,65%]
--- #4 SHM (boxing BER) + pets 9927k@118183sdps (141820dps in 70s) [10,75%]
--- #5 SHM pet 828k@9854sdps (11339dps in 73s) [0,9%]

For this try, i tanked and healed with my CLR while my friend had his WAR in the task for currency but actively played only his SHM and a BER.
I had my doubts about this setup, as we have done it for the first time with only 3players, but it turned out ok.
Key was ofc the ROG main helping us - and avoiding for the BER to kill himself.
No sprouting registered on GINA for this attempt, looks like we were lucky enough to kill it a tick before that would've happened. It certainly felt like a "just in time" kill. Due to the boxing going on, switching back and forth between sprouting and killing them in time might have proven difficult.

As time goes on, this becomes somewhat easier for even suboptimal groups but is still far from the difficulty it should be, or Gorowyn.

For us, the problem is that i box both tank+cleric (and i use ALT+TAB no 3rd party software) so the SHM is backup healer that takes a bit from his DPS potential. If my friend tank, i usually bring the ENC or "main" the cleric instead.
The healing problem isn't the tanks, it's the melee DPS - and especially BER manages to kill himself from time to time as you say.
And yes, i love BSTs and welcome when we have them to help us.

I got the Atrocious achievement in a group made of a Cleric, two Warriors, Paladin, Bard and me. It doesn't take any certain make-up to make this trivial. When things prove hard for me I go looking for what I could improve. Running to the forums to "discuss" the impossible content has never worked out for me.

Be a better operator and expect more from the others around you.

Sprouts *always* happen. That they didn't appear in GINA just means that you didn't go kill them.

Sprout spawns a few seconds after a burgeoning spawns and a few seconds after it dies

Well, i thought so too. but since i had exactly 3mobs on parse, the monstrous + the brigeoning and the boss, it at least means that it did not mature either. So yeah...
What i wanted to show with the above is that while it's not exactly *easy* and perhaps not representative either, a more or less melee-heavy group can make this now, whereas compared to pre-patch of this event some time back, we had consistently huge issues with the same ROG plus RNG and BST in place of the BER.

If we can, most can. I hope this encourages more to keep trying/doing this mission.
Still, no comparison to currency-missions from EoK :/

True on the plus side I can do FF in 5 to 10 minutes but I need to find four to six people before attempting it.

While I could do Infiltration and Mysteries of Korsha with just a partner, but they took me forever. Even with a full team it was no where nearly as fast as running FF.

This qualifier doesn't mean anything. Having gear doesn't equal skill. It just means you're a decent attendance player with DKP to spend and care about updating your magelo.

In fact, a decent portion of the top players are the terrible, old, non-adapting players that have been playing for 15y that have amassed a ton of DKP in their guild that are top on magelo. They've been playing like the game hasn't changed since they started.