Complaints aside, I actually enjoyed the dungeon and the boss mechanics we faced. For posterity, I want to talk about those boss mechanics, so that my guild and I can reference them at a later date.
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| Haughty Victory Pose! |
Glubtok
This big two-headed ogre was mostly a pushover. We wiped once only because we didn't know what to expect. The extra magic damage he does from Fists of Frost and Fists of Flame have to be managed by cooldowns and an attentive healer. During his second phase, he will drop ice bombs on the ground while he summons a fire wall on either side of his body. This 'wall' starts turning clockwise, and will insta-kill you if you get in it's way. Other than that, this boss is very un-noteworthy.
Helix Gearbreaker
This little jerk takes the place of the shredder rider from Vanilla Deadmines. He's also riding a 'vehicle,' of sorts, in the form of a Lumbering Oaf. He hits harder than the trash variants you just faced, and lays time bombs at irregular intervals that need to be avoided to prevent further damage to the party.
Intermittently, the lumbering oaf will grab a random player, walk to the far side of the room, and charge to the opposite end, causing a large amount of damage. When it was my turn, he dealt between 80-100k worth of damage. This might be a sort of gear check for dps and healers.
This entire time, Helix will occasionally jump onto a party member to strap a bomb to their chest, Al-Qaeda-style. It's important to stay away from your party members when you're the victim of this particular maneuver. When the oaf dies, Helix will continue to hop from party member to party member, planting bombs as he goes. The fight is pretty much over once the oaf is dead, since with enough mana the bombs are easy enough to manage on their own.
Foe Reaper 5000
I'm a little hazy on how this boss works, since I only saw half of the fight. From what I saw and read on wowhead, it seems as though one player needs to mount one of the provided harvesters and tank the flame elemental adds that spawn around the core, while the rest of the party takes on the boss up and down the ramp. The reason everyone moves up and down the ramp is to avoid his two primary abilities: Harvest and Overdrive.
Harvest causes him to spin up his arm blades, and charge slowly to a highlighted area on the ground. Everyone needs to move out of the Reaper's way, or they will be killed instantly by this attack.
Overdrive sends the Reaper into a bladestorm-type attack. This can be avoided if the tank and party properly kite the boss up and down the ramp.
Overall, this is an easy fight so long as the adds are controlled by the player-controlled harvester.
Admiral Ripsnarl
Ripsnarl can eat a dick.
This boss has a single sort of 'repeating phase' that restarts depending on his life(?). The first 25% is easy enough: Tank the boss facing away from the party, to ensure they don't get killed by cleave, and take note of the stacking buff. When it reaches 15, he does ridiculous damage to the tank. when he reaches 20, things can go sideways really fast. This resets with every phase change, and is a brief respite for both tank and healer.
At 75% he will vanish, and begin to summon adds along with a fog that obscures the ship's deck. The big adds require tanking, and should be burned by at least one dedicated dps. If they get too big, they will explode, instantly wiping the party. Ripsnarl will reappear shortly after, and will start building his stack again while the adds continue to spawn. If you can get through the adds and keep the tank alive at 20 stacks during the last few seconds of the phase, then you've got this fight won.
The last 25% he enrages, I believe, so any remaining cooldowns should be used here.
After him is a fight with cookie, which I didn't understand, but it seemed like free JP. So I'll talk about...
Vanessa Vancleef
The hardest part of the Defias kingpin is the walk through the nightmare that comes before it. She poisons you and forces you to walk through a dungeon full of weaker versions of previous bosses, as well as some gnarly traps. The most important one seems to be the long hallway full of spinning lightning walls. Similar to Glubtok's firewall, this wall can kill you quickly if you just walk through it. Time your sprints, and maybe bring a warlock with you if you're bringing that special guildie that can't seem to life during a frogger event. (Here's lookin' at you, Noc.)
Vancleef herself is not hard at all. There are adds, she uses a shadow step to attack multiple party members, and she plans a bomb on the deck to try to blow you up. There are ropes conveniently placed on the edge of the deck for when this happens. All you have to do is click on it, and you will swing, Harrison Jones-style off of the ship to avoid the explosion. This happens three times, the last of which will leave a stunned Vanessa to eat her last explosion.
And that's the dungeon. There will be lots of tears and rending of garments, but you'll get it finished with a little patience.
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