It's Thursday morning, and I am just barely getting to what happened on Monday. (I told you, someone turned me into a newt!) Early Monday evening, I got together with Galactrix, Gigabyte, and Scooterz to run The Darkness War Elite instance on LoneStarBelle. I've been through it a lot in normal mode, and the last boss fight in particular has long given groups fits. Xander joined us not long after we started, and the bosses went down like clockwork. I think I died maybe once, due to an add.
Since we made it through The Darkness War so quickly, Galactrix suggested we run the last instance I needed before facing the Gatekeeper, The Facility.
This one had a few surprises for Scooterz and me, but we made it through fairly easily, wiping only once on the last boss.
I am ready for Nightmares, right?
Only one hurdle to endgame dungeon running remains, Oscar, the Grouchy Gatekeeper. I chose Furia, or the DPS challenge. According to some, DPS is actually the hardest version of Oscar's Challenge.
As I said to Mogsy and Mario yesterday, my build rocks; my footwork, not so much. I think have the right stats, but either my hardware or my wetware is not up to the task yet. The DPS fight is not overly complicated intellectually. But my reflexes aren't quite up to snuff, and I tend to step in a circle at just the wrong time.
Here are my current stats, and my current Deck. I just realized this shows the "Volatile Current" passive, which is useless without "Shock." I was playing with Shock, but was trying to increase the number of "Strike" attacks to take advantage of the "Strike Force" passive. I need to replace VC.
Granted, I've only spent a portion of two evenings in the attempt. I missed Secret Monday with the Knights of Mercy. Tuesday, I went out to eat with my daughters, then spent a chunk of the evening battling Oscar. Last night, I ran a quick "Enter the Filth" run and spent some time working on this blog and reading some short stories from the superb series "A Bumbling Colonial in London" starring Frank Calhoun.
Now I open the comment forum to you, Dear Reader. Do you have any pointers on beating the DPS Gatekeeper?
Here are my current stats, and my current Deck. I just realized this shows the "Volatile Current" passive, which is useless without "Shock." I was playing with Shock, but was trying to increase the number of "Strike" attacks to take advantage of the "Strike Force" passive. I need to replace VC.
Now I open the comment forum to you, Dear Reader. Do you have any pointers on beating the DPS Gatekeeper?
Sorry. I did the tanking challenge, so I can't help with the dps one :-(
ReplyDeleteS'OK, buddy. I may break down and try the healing one, though I'm not geared nearly as well for that.
DeleteI don't have tips per se, but the fight is very tightly tuned for DPS. Everything there is a 1-shot so obviously you should be going with full dps gear. Your stats look good, you just need to practice performing your rotation flawlessly while dodging crap.
ReplyDeleteIt's a much needed skill in NMs, although a lot of the fights in the first three dungeos are significantly easier that the gatekeeper.
I think that one issue I have with the Gatekeeper fight. Realizing that in theory, if you can beat him you shouldn't have *too* much trouble with Nightmare mode, there is no real ramp up training. The elites were mostly a cake walk (partly thanks to awesome guildmates). In fact, my trip through Elite Darkness War on Monday was the easiest time I've had in there with any group. So the only way to "practice" for Oscar is to practice *with* Oscar.
DeleteWell, I did some research and watched some videos and it looks like what you need is:
ReplyDeletePhase 1: 600 dps, good ability to dodge floor AE's
Phase 2: a reliable purge
Phase 3: dps while kiting, so some decent range helps, or possibly a hinder for the add.
In looking at your build in the screenshot and at the tsw-builder link I see that you have:
Phase 1: No idea on the dps, frankly. And the other part is all up to you :P
Phase 2: You have 2 ways to apply a purge, but both are from procs and not under your direct control
Phase 3: I don't see any problem here and the dodging/kiting is again all up to you.
However, since you don't have a reliable purge, I think that your build is actually suboptimal. I'd suggest slotting Magnetic Wipe since it's a straight up "you purge the target" ability. Or if you have it, maybe even Clean Up from Shotgun instead, as this skill requires no resources and is always available, where Magnetic Wipe is a consumer and needs 3 available resources.
But anyway, slotting that single reliable purge will then enable you to free up Phantom Purge and Dial Down and replace them with higher dps passives. Aslo, as you noticed, Volatile Current does nothing at all for your current build and needs to be replaced, and Pinned Down does a random hinder for 4s every 30 seconds and is thus... well.... do you even notice it's effects when you play? I don't think that I would.
I'd suggest actually putting together a specialized build for "Oscar" even if it's not one you plan on using anywhere else. I'd go with something like this. It gives you:
Striker - Builder. Same damage as Single Barrel, is a Strike so you don't need a 2nd builder in Ignition, and always takes advantage of Strike Force passive for the 7.5% penetration increase.
Out for a Kill - Consumer. Raging Bullet does max damage at melee range. OfaK does identical damage to that max but at all ranges.
Flame Strike - Strike consumer with same cast time as the GCD and only 2 resources so it can be cast faster and more often than Thor's Hammer and thus have higher sustained dps
Magnetic Wipe - Purge
Turn the Tables - self heal
Short Fuse - Excellent buff!
Breaching Shot - Excellent buff #2!
Strike Force - increased pen chance for Strike attacks
Iron Maiden - increased pen chance for all attacks, after you pen an afflicted target
Bloodsport - applies afflict on any non-glancing hit
Incision - pens cause an additional afflict
3rd Degree - every 4th pen causes another afflict
Sudden Return - pens do additional damage
Gross Anatomy - when afflicts expire another hit is taken by the target. Whenever I've parsed this out with 3 afflicts in the build like this it does as much damage as a finisher - passively. It's awesome!
Downside to this build is that it needs 2 blade passives which you'd have to build toward, and you don't have a lot of Blood on your chronicle, so it's unlikely that you have 3rd Degree or Gross Anatomy either. So an alternate set of passives might be like this.
The 4 substitions are:
Mind over Matter - afflicts on critical hit
Brawler - +15% crit damage
Elemental Force - every 8th hit is a crit. Make your rotation put this on Out for a Kill as much as possible.
Cool, Calm, and Collected - 8% boost to all damage for 10s after a crit. EF keeps this up 100% of the time.
Sorry this is so long, but I hop it gives you some ideas, at least. BTW, when you say "the only way to "practice" for Oscar is to practice *with* Oscar" you can at least practice with and tweak your build vs the combat holograms in the Illuminati headquarters to see what gibve you the best damage before you go in and then have to "practice" with avoiding the ground crap and the add.
I actually beat Oscar about 45 minutes before you posted your comment. :P But I do appreciate your advice. I guess I should have posted on more than just Twitter, but I am about to do a semi-in-depth post on the topic. Including the build I ended up using.
DeleteAwesome! Congratulations! Now I'm looking forward to reading posts about KoM NM runs.
Delete