Morning all. After a few class-internal discussions at another place we didn't found out a smart way through the 5th halfling riddle in PoM. My current solution is to parse several minutes of battling each halfling (piercing only, no backstabs, no discs, no poisons) and selecting the one with the least-taken average DPS over the whole time of each fight. This solution doesn't satify me: it's not smart, needs some time and involves parsing, means the useage of a 3rd party tool. I don't want to believe the solution is to camp a special item, maybe with a certain proc which gets resisted by one of the hobbits. Any other ideas?
I got stuck on that too. I used my [hint] thing for that last part and it said something about bixies using their stinger. Like you, I tried to attack and see which one seemed to defend against piercing attacks the best. That didn't work, then I tried just doing backstabs only, but we have so many modifier type things it's hard to tell because massive strike kind of skews the results. Also I have old halfling models on so I don't know if there's a visual element to the hint that I can't see. I ended up giving up and never passing that part (I also couldn't sneak past those other guards for the 3rd puzzle. Kind of disappointed I didn't fully figure it all out.
That's the reason I spoke of several minutes of parsing on EACH halfling. After 3-5 minutes you get a good average DPS with differences between each halfling's taken damage. If you use e.g. GamParse to monitor the DPS, stop fighting each halfling after the same time of fight (I suggest more than 200 sec but not too long; the whole script has a time limit). I missed to make it clear I used no HASTE spells and no additional proc buffs or poisons (if they fade inmidst of a parsing, your results get borked) and even no stats buffs which won't hold during the whole session. To be on the safe side, click every buff off. The weaponry ... the first successful run I made with both EPIC's (2.0 and 1) because the hint I got from a guildie was other clases had to use their epics too. The second successful try was with my daily-work weapon setup. I guess any piercing-only setup will do, just be sure they don't have any damage proc which would bring randomness into the results. And yes, I didn't figure out a better way yet ... disappointing .
