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I’m a little late with this week’s Secret Monday update. Blame the extra chores our surprise snow storm caused. In any event, the Knights of Mercy took on Nightmare Polaris once again, and this time pretty much rocked it.
First, as always, the night was full of laughs and hijinks. With the release of the new waistcoats in the Item Store, Pid and I once again had a melding of the fashion minds and showed up in highland dress. We learned rather quickly that one should never do handstands in a kilt.
Mogsy was quick with the disapproving looks, but we’re used to them. We only had a handful of wipes leading up to the Ur-Draug, so for the most part I believe she was mollified. I should mention that it was a rare night. In previous attempts we have spent nearly an hour on Haugbui Jarl and Primordial Dweller respectively. Monday night we swept the first five bosses in a little over an hour total.
High on our success, we went into the Ur-Draug‘s tide pool with great expectations. We spent the next hour being proven more and more wrong. That is not to say it wasn’t fun, and I think Mogsy makes some excellent points about the learning curve in her post on the subject, but if I had one complaint it is the random and pretty much guaranteed wipe that is which pillar ol’tentacle snout decides to smash.
Reading through the comments on Mogsy’s post, though, seems to indicate this may be a DPS issue. It also seems that we shouldn’t be expecting to beat the Cthulhu wannabe our first time facing him in Nightmare Polaris. So I think we’ll continue farming POL1-5, and then also start in on farming the first 4-5 bosses in the next two Nightmare dungeons. I’m looking forward to not having sopping wet boots all the time.
As mentioned earlier I was sporting full highland dress for Monday night’s run (I won’t inflict upon you the brief moments when we switched to Speedos ‘for luck’). I also changed Chucho’s hairstyle and facial hair. I was getting tired of the grunge look and Mogsy said it made Chucho look like a girl.
As long as you’re having fun and getting bullion, who cares if you “beat the whole thing” or not? 😉 I for one, enjoy reading all of the KoM writeups!
Heheh. Glad you enjoy them. And yeah, I think that’s the attitude we’re adopting.
So do i. I mean, i rarely learn something utterly new (you could do that by surprisingly beat Hell Fallen NM, i never was in that one yet), but still i very much enjoy reading your battle reports. So, keep them going, please. 🙂
And also, yes, beating the whole thing was a long way to go for my Cabal, too. We’ve spent several evenings doing the first four or five bosses of Pol, HR and DW, before we finally managed to defeat the last bosses of DW and Pol, in that order. And the last boss of HR still eluded us for a long time, till both our gear, setup, knowledge of the fights and player ability were sufficient to defeat that one.
Hmm. “Both” and then 4 points. Clearly shows that i still have to practice my “count to four” ability. 😀
Heheh. Thanks! I have fun writing them. And yeah, we’re quickly discovering doing the first 4-5 in the first 3 dungeons is the trick. HF is up next, I think.
HF next? Wow, you are aiming high. That is the one NM dungeon which i yet have to complete.
I advise you rather look at Hell Eternal for the fourth dungeon to go for. That one is not that hard if you have a clue on what to expect.
Some pointers:
– green chains kill you if not removed. Sleight of Hand does so well enough, just as WinWin from pistols.
(You might want to have everybody in the team have SoH.For the first boss you additionally need more than one person with WinWin, as the cooldown of SoH is too long to be enough. The elite ability Contortionist also is useful, although it does not display if it already triggered. )
– Cleanup is not that helpful, its purge component leads to a backlash (massive group damage) at some bosses which easily gets you killed.
– Due to several of the bosses having shields it’s possible but quite challenging to heal with AR. You preferably want a fist healer, blood shields are optional.
– Due to reflect shields, your healer wants to have a spamable AoE heal. Shelter is your friend here.
– Some bosses have a stacking effect which “reflects” more and more of healing away from teammates. A strongly geared healer still easily wins the numbers game, but if healing gets problematic you might want to have a DD deliver the corruption debuff to mitigate this effect.
– You will need a runner at two of those bosses. Thus decide which of your damage dealers goes Commando, splits off from the group and fulfills the “special mission”. As this already now got plenty of text i won’t go the full distance here. If you need more info on the runner task, contact me in game (name: Slad) or look up corresponding guides.
Whoops! Dangiit. I actually meant HR … Hell Raised. I think that’s what we’re trying next. But thanks for the tips on HE. I’ll definitely keep them in mind.
Keep in mind that the “theme” of HR is “dps race” and that the mobs all have very high defense ratings — stack a lot of hit when going in there!
Cool! Thanks for he heads up. Yeah, I’m just learning about these NM “themes”.