Okay. We run the zone yesterday. We finished zone yesterday. Our group was warden (me) with full Ry'Gorr armor, full set of fabled jewelry from ToFSx2. Full Ry'Gorr geared mystic with some fabled jewelry and coercer who had same quality of gear. The rest of the group was fully Raid EM geared players. Dirge, assassin and monk. And we received Shorthanded Victory achievement for last named. But let's start at the beginning. From start to the ~ middle of the zone the difficulty seems to be a step down from Spire of Rage with not so hard trash mobs and reasonable nameds. Then difficulty just sky rockets. 1st named ports players around and summons some adds. Easy by standarts of the zone. 2nd named seems just to be tank and spank and we killed it without much trouble. The only gimmick it has that it calls all the aviaks in its room. So just clear all of them. 3rd named Shinni-Zonn Livia. She isn't that hard. Just attack her, kill adds when she creates that barrier around her and then after she's attackable again simply kill her, at 30% of her hp she will summon "black glass shard" mob, since it drains your health and power and it's static, simply move the group away from it and finish Livia. And then last 2 nameds are simple and pure torture. Prime Shinni-Zonn Hypatia. She hits hard. She puts nasty curse on player and if you cure it, then the group is hit with powerful attack which deals damage to group health and power too. Same if it expires. Similar to Mark of Discontiniunce from second to last named in Temple of Rallos Zek. She spawns 4 types of adds. Saddened, asphixating, fragmented and envious. You must kill saddened (heavy ae damage on group) and asphixating (heavy power drain on group) and leave fragmented (they blow up and damage the group on kill) and envious (iirc those put buff on you or damage the named) alive. So it boils down to killing some adds, leaving other and dealing with the curse and very powerful damage shield she puts on herself from time to time. You have one more named - Warmaster Korok Hai. To make long story short, this is brute froce boss. And since, if brute force doesn't work, you're just not using enough brute force. Well Korok Hai uses enough brute force to make you into some fine paste and then make even finer paste from that paste. Named by himself is a complete and utter joke, but you have to survive for 4 minutes before he even can be killed, because by survive i mean he stays rooted in place and sends constant waves of adds who all hit hard, put detrimentals on group that slow cast of spells and hit really hard. Then after 4 minutes of this torture named finally decides: "Okay you're worthy to be killed by me, so here i come!" and he does. His adds pattern is as follows. Fight begins. 1. Timer is at 0 seconds from beginning of the fight. 6 diaku slicers (drunder warboars). 2. Timer is at 20 seconds from beginning of the fight. 2 ralossian gorefiends (2 legged boarfiends with swords). 3. Timer is at 40 seconds from beginning of the fight. 1 ralossian blademaster (same as gorefiend, but a bit bigger). 4. Timer is at 60 seconds = 0 seconds from beginning of the fight. Repeat steps 1 to 3 for 3 more minutes. After those 4 minutes Korok Hai unroots himself and comes for you. He memwipes and has some ae, but that's pretty much it. All in all it's simple dps and hps check. Kill gorefiends and especially blademaster as fast as you can. For the last named we had to shuffle group a lot and we ended up with warden, same coercer, and raid geared paladin, dirge, illusionist and inquisitor. Pally had 60+k hp and we had troubles keeping him alive. Our combined heal parse was almost 30k. And dps around 250k. It was brutally hard and nothing in heroic content even comes close. So the conclusion. This zone is not for faint of heart. So be ready to die. Sometimes a lot. Pretty much every group setup will work for first 4 nameds, but if you want to kill last named, either bring 2 good healers, good ae dps or both. Or just be awesome and soloheal it without ae dps. =) P.S. Sorry for my english since it's not my 1st language. P.P.S. Edited the post for more comprehensible stategies.
SS is a easily cleared zone for heroic content, Ive done it many times with toons that would barely get a second look if you inspected the toon. you cant go into a AE fight, with a assassin, and wonder why its hard. AE fight, bring AE DPS. a assassin would be passable for the fight, but you would be far better off with a swash, warlock, even a troub, or enchanter can do some major damage in that encounter, since the majority of the fight is linked. its a fun fight, but you have to go in there prepared. you know the fight now, so next time you know better what to do. the drunder zones have been nerfed enough.... as for hypathia, its a control fight. I hate that fight, cause its so vague and poorly defined. I literally could not figure this fight out, till I failed about 10 times, and had ACT running, recording tons of info, so I could examine waht the damage types were, and what happend if you killed what. its a extremely vague fight, that in my opinion gives no real clues to the player on how to actually do the encounter. I assumed if the adds are suppose to be dealt with in various ways, they would have a buff on them I could examine and get a clue from, or a text taht would imply something. but theres nothing like that, nothing at all, things happen, and theres no real way to know why they happened.... its a very poorly designed encounter on so many levels. so I will save you a ton of time.... the asphyxiating and saddened need to be killed. the other two leave them alone, they are benificial to you, and will go away on thier own. watch the buffs on the name, occassionally she gets a new buff on her, a damage shield, if you hit her, when its up, you die fast. ignore the curse. when the buff is on the name - kill the saddened and asphyxiating - if they arent up, just do no DPS, and wait for the shield to drop. ALL AE dps needs to be disabled and avoided on this encounter, killing the wrong thing will kill you fast. its a control fight... a very verrrrrrrry poorly scripted, vague fight, but its only a control fight. DPS alone is not the key to killing it, unless you can burn it down very very quickly, before the damage shield is on the name.
You'll have an entirely different view of that last fight if you go in there with an AE tank and an AE DPS or two. It's actually a lot of fun. There should be encounters for everyone, and this one is for AE DPS, without question.
It's a stupid fight because you have to exclude people if you're AoE DPS isn't high enough. Strategies shouldn't be about excluding classes because of something their missing. EDIT: This is especially true since the dungeon finder can put a S-S group together with almost no AoE DPS, which is due to fail. Also, why is S-S a bad word excluded by the badword filter (without the -)? That's so absurd...
Hm... Okay i'll try to make group, with a lock and/or swash next time. But first time is always the hardest and you have to learn from your mistakes. Still the zone was a great fun, and i'll try to run Tower of Tactics next. Off-topic. S-S is filtered for the same reason the word na-zi is filtered.
What boggles my mind is that people run ANY zone without a single high AE dps class. What in the hell are you thinking?
Well if anyone remembers what the original Warmaster Korok Hai was like, that fight has been nerfed into the ground. When I was trying to kill it before any nerfs happened to it, all the adds used to have like 100 percent 180 degree AE auto. Also even with 600k dps, it wasn't enough to keep up with the adds, and our best attempt was around 600k dps, with a bruiser and a monk tank each doing over 100k, and a defiler and a warden. I was on the defiler, on just over a 5 minute pull did 28k hps, the warden was doing 22k hps. The dps was between 550 and 600, I can't remember exactly. In the end of the day, the fight is still all about how much spank you bring, but it is still a very rough encounter for heroic geared people to be able to do, without very stacked setups for the aoe dps. I will say this tho, the trick to that fight is dps, the more you bring the easier it is, going the healing or tanking route is a trap no matter how it may seem. Burning down waves before the next one shows up is the key to winning that fight, it always was, even back at the start, but at the time, it simply was not possible for my guild to setup a heroic group for that encounter with enough dps. Oh a little note about Prime Shinni-Zonn Hypatia, who ever has the curse, if they can get 15 meters away from the next closest group member, when the curse expires it does an aoe form the player that does damage and power drain or something along those lines. Btw its been awhile since I did an in depth study of this encounter, and this used to be true, but it may have since been nerfed. A current encounter that really feels like the old Warmaster Korok Hai fight did, except even worse, is the second named in EoW challenge mode. Now after a lot of testing on this encounter, I was not able to find any tricks at all to help with the fight. It just seemed like a fight you need an incredible amount of spank to beat. The best I was able to do on it was to kill the two easier named with around 850k dps with a group of two healers, a tank, a bard and two dps. For anyone who has legitimately killed this, am I going with a flawed setup? I have killed this mob a couple of times taking advantage of bug the first couple days after it came out, but have avoided that since then. If anyone was actually willing to give some real advice on this named, there are many details of various things that my group has been finding very hard to deal with on this encounter, as it really feels so completely over the top insane difficult.
My guess is that it is over the top, Henn. The challenge version has received little to no testing. Post what you find in a separate topic and be specific. Kander might take a look at it and see if things are out of line.
Gaealiege@Butcherblock wrote: Well that was the first time in the zone for the whole group. And usually you don't need tons of AE damage. Or at least not for the final named where it's crucial. =)
Ah, I gotcha. My group always runs AE dps. If we find a room that is weaker we pull the entire thing. Speeds up the zone even from the first go.
flay_wind wrote: Drunder Risk VS Reward is fantastic now. Don't make the zones easier, please. The difficulty is refreshing. They are like mini-raids. Seriously you can get MULTIPLE pieces of almost easy mode raid quality armor from each zone (look at the ore breakdown stuff now)...Risk vs reward was a problem, but is not an issue now at all! One breakdown gives 18 ore! Hypatia is incredibly, incredibly easy. If she isn't, then you haven't figured out what to do yet. Spend some time and figure out what to do, or search a bit for the strat. Also, she doesn't hit hard at all--a caster can tank her no problem. You're probably doing something you aren't supposed too. Really--she's easy. I don't wanna give it away because figuring it out is the fun of it, but if you don't want to figure it out for yourself you can google the strat. Korok--yes, can be difficult. I didn't beat it on my first two times into the zone. That's fine, these are difficult zones. However, I beat it easily now. And no, we don't have a warlock, wizard, swash, or conjurer..or SK..or berserker, in the group. Your issue was you had two enchanters. Replace an enchanter with a DPS class and you'll have much better success. If you're not willing to do that, use potions/blessing/miracles and go all out and you might succeed anyway. These zones do require a good group makeup and some coordination, but some of the rewards are very nice. As for EoW, I haven't beaten decorin bonewing with the regular group yet. Figuring will take some raid geared pieces on more characters to do that, or give in and try to zerg it--have gotten close--it's a tough fight, for sure...but that's okay, will make it all the better when I beat it.
Xivian@Permafrost wrote: This. Its getting worse each expansion/patch. There is still a zone in loping plains i never ever saw from inside since a warden, back then, couldnt heal it. Self-adulating is a sin, even in games
I solo healed every TSO dungeon released on my Fury. Not a raid geared character, just my "for fun" Fury. If you couldn't do it there was some sort of PEBCAK issue going on. You can do Drunder 2 without AE DPS, it's just harder.
