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This last Secret Monday was all about The Knights of Mercy doing all the things that scare the crap out of us; seemed fitting as it was the first Secret Monday of October, the most awesome month of all. The delving into our innermost fears culminated with a run against our very first Nightmare Mode Dungeon, but before I get to that I have tons of screenshots of the adventures leading up to that fateful encounter.
We started off the night by checking on how things are progressing in The Filth’s incursion into Agartha. The last Tendril of Dis was dispatched sometime early the day before, and we’d hoped Funcom would follow the pattern they did with the previous phase of this event, and start the next phase immediately. Sadly, they have done nothing more than hint at what’s next. The portal next to the Tokyo portal now has a Filthy vortex beneath it, but there is as yet no way to reach it. We decided then to capitalized on Sylow’s Lair advice from last week (thanks, Sylow!), and headed to The Savage Coast Lair.
Sylow’s advice for the last quest in The Savage Coast Lair, The Cover-Up, was spot on. After some discussion about who would click what, and donning as much health gear as we all could, MMO Gamer Chick and I switched to our tanking gear/decks, we counted down, and blew up that damned spring. Then we tucked tail and ran to resounding success. We celebrated with a little dance.
Flushed with the glow of victory, we decided to comb through all of the Lair Boss pieces we’d collected over the last couple of weeks to see if we had enough to summon at least one lair boss. It turned out we had enough to summon all three of The Savage Coast Lair Bosses. Having not the slightest clue what to expect, we decided to first offer the weirdest prayer to Mecca I’ve ever witness.
Big Mikey Ocho then busted out his fancy crafting add-on (UltimateCrafter) and we summoned our first boss, Filth Vector. I’m happy to report that he fell, almost disappointingly, very quickly to our combined firepower.
Riding the victory high like Cheech & Chong, we summoned the next two bosses: Lost Sarcoma and Shadow of Depravity (we called him Miley Cyrus … all he was missing was a wrecking ball, though he did lick a lot of sledge hammers). Lost Sarcoma fell as quickly as Filth Vector, but Miley Cyrus’ inability to be tanked gave us minor issues. Luckily it wasn’t anything zerging from the Anima Node couldn’t solve.
With the last Lair Boss in The Savage Coast Lair down, we celebrated with a synchronized headstand. As these were the first lair bosses we’d fought and downed, we didn’t have nearly enough new purple boss pieces to summon the big bad guy, so those of us that have downed Dr. Goldhattan decided tonight was the night to try our first Nightmare Mode Dungeon.
I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but the decision was made to tackle Polaris first. Like I said, there was a theme of doing the things that scare us, and Polaris Elite is the dungeon that has historically given us the most trouble. Still, things actually went amazingly well until we got to Mr. Crabs. I lost count of the amount of attempts it took us before we got both the timing and the positioning down. In the end it took our combined efforts, with Purges and Impairs, to send him back to Davy Jones. We then headed on to Mrs. Puff (see what I’m doing here … fuck, I’m funny), and though she was also difficult, some of the lessons learned on Mr. Crabs paid dividends and we eventually downed her as well.
By then it was quite late for those of us on the East Coast, and we were all pretty wiped, so we decided to not even attempt Squidward (seriously, I’m hilarious) and called it a night. I’m happy to say I did not once submit to a costume change in a vain attempt to change our luck. That’s mostly because the whole night felt like a rousing success, and I was more than comfortable in my Faux Belloq: white tux jacket, pants, and shoes, casual button shirt, and white fedora. I didn’t even get any blood on it.
Gratz on the lair bosses and getting 4/6 POL on your 1st try! Believe it or not, I think Pol5 is the worst boss in NM mode. Ur-Draug is a tank-n-spank by comparison. That said, Pol5 only has about 250K HP, so if you’ve got decent dps it drops fast and doesn’t have time to use all of its nasty mechanics. And on the other bright side, he only summons the damn bomb adds 3x, so if you can survive past the 3rd wave of them, then it’s just a matter of killing the swarms that add to the healer and working on him.
And it really helps if someone purges of Tide Wall when he casts it, otherwise he’s shielded for its 20s duration and that doesn’t help either 😉 Cleanup works for your sterotypical shotgun dps people, or Magnetic Wipe if someone’s running Elemental.
Anyway. . . glad to see you having fun in TSW. I hope to get on and join you guys some Monday once I get IRL issues with that night squared way.
Oh, cool! Thanks for the advice on POL5. I think it may be another couple of weeks before we hit our next NM. We had a few people out of town next week. We’ll definitely put your advice to good use when we do, though. 😀
Well if I can get on next Monday night, I’d be happy to come on a run with y’all. We could probably fill out a group from people in the “noobmares” channel, if necessary.
Cool. There’s a noobmares channel?! That’s hilarious. What’s your handle in game?
I’m “Clarisse” in game. http://chronicle.thesecretworld.com/character/Clarisse
And yes — /chat join noobmares for the channel. People in it expect undergeared, bad builds, incomplete runs, etc. That said, a lot of fully geared people hang out in there and are often willing to join up to “carry” lesser skilled people too. My experience has been completely positive in noobmare groups so far. 1st group went 6/6 Polaris, but for some reason got stuck on DW5. Was still fun, no recriminations, just buckled down and kept trying. Most recent group was a 17/18 run. Couldn’t quite get Machine Tyrant down. We’d get to the phase where he’s constantly returning to center which is “the easiest part” and get sloppy and wipe. Was kinda funny, really.
I think, though, our plan for this coming Monday is to get a few of our other guildies caught up on their ELite mode dungeons. We still have a couple that haven’t face The Gatekeeper.
I’m always up for elite runs too. Chance for blue aux kit upgrade while helping fellow players out? Sign me up! 😛
Cool beans. 🙂 I’ll keep an eye out for you.
Polaris was the first NM I ran too! I didn’t have to deal with purges or anything, but I was tanking so I learned some quick lessons in the importance of impairs.
LOL Yeah, our tank quickly learned those lessons too. Heheh.
Charged Hack FTL! Also helps on Pol3 if the healer has Shelter for the lightning phase on the crates, though isn’t absolutely required either.
Heheh, Actually Mjolnir’s Echo was giving us the most trouble on POL3. Finally, we decided to double down on impairs: tank did Charged Hack and I did Mjolnir’s Echo. And for the crates phase, our healer just healed us through while we stood in one place. Though, he did complain of a tired wrist after … we made jokes. 😀 I’ll mention Shelter, though. He could probably stand the break.
Shelter is simply a PBAE healing Builder, so you stand close and the healer spams. Sounds to me like he was already doing it.
Ah. You’re probably right.
Congratulations on your success on the lair, glad i was able to help. (Although Syp says it feels like a cheat to him. Alas, for me and my people at that time it just felt like a logical move. Plant bombs, distract defenders, finish them off outside while they do not defend the objective. )
On your nightmare touring, i think you actually made a good choice. Polaris is one of the easiest dungeons to run, only Darkness War might still be
a bit easier.
On pkudude99s comment of the 5th boss of Polaris being that hard: really? I usually tank or heal, and in those roles i find the fight very easy, up to the level of trivial and boring. The unusual part is that bomb interception has to be done by the DDs, who too often are not used to this. (A role which i rarely cover, so i have to admit that i am not well trained in the bomb interception task. )
On the comment of MachineTyrant: hehe, i know that very well. I think it’s been several weeks of 17/18, improving gear, setups and our ability to fight while moving till we actually defeated that one.
Next to that, i also add my offer of helping in NMs if you need a hand. My NM activity dropped significally since a few weeks, though. Other MMOs cost us most of your “NM core players”, the rest mostly moved on to other Cabals, leaving just a few of us with NM experience left to teach the younger people in our Cabal. Thus i am a tad out of training and possibly not the “highest skill level” player you could get, but still, if you can use a hand, just let me know. My characters name is “Slad”.
PS: noobmares? Hmm. Didn’t know of that one yet, but i guess it’s not a bad idea.
[And, i hope this doesn’t somehow turn into a double posting, but my first time posting this somehow seems to have gotten lost.]
Thanks! And yeah, admittedly, it did feel a bit like a cheat, but also for me felt like it was a valid strategy for how the Lair was set up. Plus, it still required coordination and the two tanks gathering everything up as we ran out. I think it we were mostly just all stunned at how well it worked. LOL
I definitely see pkudude99’s point about POL5, though. That boss and POL6 always give us troubles even in Elite mode.
And thanks for the offer of help! I’ll add you to my Friends list and keep an eye out for you. 😀 As I said, this Monday I think we’ll be focusing on helping some of our lowbies finish up their ELites and gear up, and with the Halloween and Agartha events coming this month I’m not sure how many NMs we’ll be doing in the coming weeks. We’re a multi-game guild and pretty much only play TSW on Monday nights, but, when we get back to it help will definitely be appreciated. 😀
FWIW, on that 17/18 noobmare run I mentioned, we had a leech healer and a “more advanced” dps player in the group, so POL5 went down right after the 1st wave of bomb adds and I only CU’d the Tide Wall once. Easiest I’d ever done it since the fight was short. So I’m gonna have to go with Sylow — it’s hard with low dps, and easy with high dps.
Of course, that can probably be said of any fight, really. . . .
the point of Pol5 in my book is not so much “high” but “competent” DPS. I’ve run polaris where i tanked for a group of alts from friends. Originally those alts were made to experience another factions storyline, now they all were NM ready, but most of them had almost no purple gear. Thus damage by itself was not that high, we had several waves of bombs, but the players knew what they were doing, watched the bombs spawn and intercepted them properly. (For those not aware of the mechanics: You don’t ever attack the bombs, just go there, trigger their explosion countdown and move away again thanks to Sleight of Hand. They will still blow up, but without doing any damage. )
So despite low gear and thus mediocre damage, the bombs and thus the whole encounter never was critical, while i’ve experienced plenty of self-proclaimed “high-skill” players in all 10.4 who for reasons i don’t understand have no idea how to intercept the bombs, resulting in frequent wipes.
Glad your first NM Polaris run was a success! Polaris was the first one I ran also, and it may be the second easiest of the 18/18 dungeons but I’ve still had groups stall HARD on boss 5. I generally tank that dungeon so I don’t have to deal with the adds much, fortunately. 🙂
I would also be more than willing to step in and help out with any nightmares or elites you guys are doing. I know Pol and DW well, a bit iffy buy mostly good on HR (mostly I forget which abilities to impair), and of course elites aren’t too hard for me now (mostly 10.1/2, a couple of custom 10.3+ purples). Look me up online, I’m Shoggotha.
Cool! I’ll add you to my Friends list. 🙂