Rants tag

Rants, ruminations, and rambling remarks from my mad, muddled, meandering mind.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Secret Monday: Slaughtered

This somewhat delayed post is brought you at the behest of my BtV crewmate, Galactrix, who doesn't want to go a week without an update from Secret Mondays and the Knights of Mercy.

As I mentioned last week, the only thing standing between Double D* and the Gatekeeper is the Slaughterhouse, which Tententacles had graciously volunteered to tank for us. After making some plans on Twitter in the morning, Fire Team Bravo met up outside the Agartha portal at 8:30 CST and plunged in. Tenten tanked, of course. And I healed while Scooter, Ocho, and Syp brought the pain. We made short work off the first boss, Psychoassailant. Well, after wiping once or twice.
Have you ever tried to get blood out of a hoodie?
NKL-107 was a different story. This boss is notorious for being the hardest in the Elite Dungeons. Reading up on the forums, there are, of course, people who say he's not that hard and the rest of us just need to learn to play. Those people are assholes. Of course we need to learn to play. However, just because they may have figured it out already doesn't give anyone the right to belittle other players looking for help. Not that I think NKL needs to be nerfed or anything, but it is weird that this fight seems more difficult than the rest of the Elite dungeons, by a wide margin—including the rest of the Slaughterhouse.

Anyway, I had been through the dungeon at least once with LoneStarBelle and members of Beyond the Veil, led by Galactrix. The tactics we used were different than what Tententacles was accustomed to. Tenten's strategy involves ignoring the adds (here I am assuming you are familiar with the fight) until NKL goes into his kill-everything plasma burst, then drag the adds into the "meatlocker" at one corner of the room. This seems like a viable tactic at first. But then we always seemed to get too many adds and a few would break loose and kill the healer, or one of NKL's other abilities (10,000 Volts) would one-shot the tank and then the healer. We tried many times to do it his way; Scooter said it was about two hours.

We then attempted to use Galactrix' method. I may not have explained it very well, having only seen it in action once or twice. But it involves having a second tank drag two or three adds off right away and shut them down with DPS in the meatlocker, then rinse and repeat until most or all of them are kaput. In this method, little damage is done to the boss until the adds are all out of the way. This also seems to delay the plasma burst boss ability until near the end of the fight, but that only be my perception.

In both strategies, controlling the number of active adds at any given time is critical. Too many adds can overwhelm the tank's ability to keep aggro, and the healer is usually next in line on the aggro table. I don't know for sure, but the 10 Kilovolts one-shot may hinge on the number of active adds, as well.

In any event, we were unsuccessful in bringing down NKL-107 on Monday night, even after Mogsy stepped in to tank, with a minor shuffling of roles. We'll make another attempt this coming Monday, if my KoMies are willing.
Cleaning up Egypt took a little elbow . . . grease.
This week's Mon de la mode is brought to you by Aten Glitch, the amazing new fashion sensation that renders part or all of you invisible. Yes, as you can see, donning my Desert Dress Casual shirt led to the disappearance of my elbows. And you know it was real because even my shadow had no elbows. This was seen by my compatriots and was verified by Tenten on his own character, Chucho.

*Dex-y and Dortmunder

2 comments:

  1. Yes.... I now have a vendetta against this boss. He must be taken down. Nobody makes short work of the Knights of Mercy! NOBODY!

    ReplyDelete