The normal damage from him is fine, but occasionally he'll get the buff he's meant to get if the adds hit the tank for no reason and own me on my bruiser. Just frustrating.
Strike of the Arcane 52k - 60k per melee. At one point, I blocked his melee and still received the Strike of the Arcane for 60831 cold damage.
We're avoiding the blazing weapon at all costs, the member not tanking is getting the items and catching the axes before they reach the primary tank at the time.
Warlocks get especially hosed, because apparently the hit formula is atrocious. Warlocks only have 1 nox debuff, yet a large portion of their spells aren't nox damage. The damage is really spread across all 3 types, and not in a good way. You can't rely on procs to debuff, because that's a laughable joke, especially in furnace when the spell has to actually hit first or you're dead. Then you have things like Curse of Darkness pulling a 50% hit rate, lol. And that's with 960 cast skills / 5% resistability. I really don't understand why we can't just get a unique buff package in these zones. It feels lazy. What Kander means to say, is that much like players, they got lucky enough on a pull to not get resisted enough to kill it, so they said it was fine. Bad design.
So just had a pull where the Mastersmith and I had ZERO stacks for the first 25%, then the blacksmith spawns, begins to **** me then the SK takes over and gets ***** and dies. I've never had a pull like that, seemed like a gift from the heavens ... oh wait the blacksmith had other intentions. Avoidances don't work against the blacksmith, the proc damage continues even though I block/riposte/dodge the melee. There is zero chance of going into that zone with a group that lacks either a dps healer or pally + high dps. Purely due to the fact of the blacksmith. Blazing weapon is not the issue, that is completely preventable.
You have to make sure the blacksmith is the type you can tank without getting ***** by interrupting the spell he is casting, possibly multiple times -_-
As a mage (sorc) with a priest partner, I find it easier to tank the named, and then de-positional the named after the adds spawn (since they initially head for the person tanking the named). Then just pull the named back through dps once the adds are dead, and rinse/repeat for each cycle. Added advantage is that all apprentices can be set to the archetype of the other person, and ignored - and that you don't really need to plan anything extra for dealing with the Unmaker increments. Not ideal, but makes managing the adds a whole lot easier (with the higher resist rates).
As for me zones are fine except some random with stacks in the Furnace. Is it possible to make stacks landing not random - but 1 every 8-10 sec's for example? It's really sad when i get 8 stacks in 10 secs...
What is the normal damage from him? Every 4-5 seconds he does one of the following procs: Strike of the Arcane Strike of the Brute Strike of the Divine Strike of the Shadows The casting time is very fast, faster than I can hit my one interrupt that is recast of 10 seconds ... oh and it resists alot because of the crazy spell resist issues. Check ACT because I have it open and looking at hours of attempts. The Blazing Weapon is a failure to keep the axes away from person tanking the named(s). If you get that then you're doing it wrong. It is completely avoidable. Read this text carefully ... the Strike proc lands on the tank that is targeted 100% of the time regardless of any avoidance attempts. I've read the log. That is a shear disadvantage because the monk can only block one proc with superior guard every 8 proc strikes ... superior guard having a recast of 35-37 seconds. When the blacksmith pops, I immediately throw tsunami and Brawler's Tenacity (BT), the three triggers from BT are gone within 15 seconds. No exaggeration. I pop provoking stance to limit the incoming damage but I'm still taking 30-40k every 5 seconds. I'm using every trick the monk class has to offer, tanking the blacksmith is brutal. My group member and I time it so that as the blacksmith pops, I have zero stacks of the Unmake detriments as well. The other zones have scripts that are difficult, but do-able with some luck. The Furnace of Ages zone is just awful because of how the blacksmith is currently scripted. A bit much Kander?
Clevemo, you're still doing it wrong. Want me to post a video for you, before you dig yourself further into a hole? lol. I promise, if you do figure it out, that eureka moment will give you an instant boner. If you want it spoiled, by all means.. PM me. You can watch us kill it
A couple of days ago a wizzy parse was posted on eq2flames that had a 98.4% hit rate. Not 100%, but close enough, so it can be done.
Yeh, 98.4 on raid mobs. Raids with 4 enchanters, multiple mage dps, 4 bards, a brig etc. In these duos you don't have those debuffs available to you.
Resistability and hit rates have been balanced around their DPS impact. Not the notion of hitting a full set of unlinked adds to get their attention. It's a fairly unique situation (Most mages don't generally TRY to get aggro on anything), and should have a fairly unique solution. Whether the weapon buff should give you a huge resistability reduction, or the mobs should just not have resists period.
