04 Jun 2009 at 08:56 - 10
(Small video at bottom of this post)
Ok after dreading getting around to this one after reading various posts about it, I did this tonight. I was surprised, this was actually the easiest and fastest of the 9 HM dungeons I've done so far. I'm not trying to be one of "those" guys that says things are easy just to annoy everyone. I'll explain what made it easy and provide a video clip.
My setup was pretty standard stuff, 2 N/Mos (one death, one curses, but both with smiting and RoJ), plus the standard Sabway N/Rt for splinter weapon and AOE heals. By the way, this was a WAY better setup than when I tried 3 ROJs; it wasn't even close. The N/Rt's 2 AOE heals and splinter weapon are simply excellent. I did NOT bring frozen soil, because it was never even remotely necessary, stuff died way too fast.
If you've been reading various H/H threads, you probably know I love the new Strength of Honor and Splinter Weapon, as these two skills put out insane damage.
I took the advice of others and brought the healer, prot, earth, and interrupt ranger (Zho). Zho was absolutely excellent in this dungeon, and interrupted a lot of nasty stuff.
Then, I took the excellent advice of Shayne Hawke above to deal with the mob at the end of the first floor. So the total time to from entering the first floor to exiting it, was about 5 minutes. Doing it that way was so trivial it was ridiculous.
Taking out mobs with 1 stone summit healer was a joke really, as you can see; I ran in with Enraging Charge, For Great Justice!, hit the healer once, then immediately knocked him down with brawling headbutt and unloaded. My attacks, buffed to ridiculous levels by Strength of Honor, splinter weapon, not to mention a ROJ or two, easily killed him and anything in the vicinity.
Where possible I tried to set things up so that I was near multiple targets for max splinterage.
On the second floor I did have a problem with that huge group with the boss at the top of the stairs. So I followed Jeydra's advice in this thread, and just pulled them back and forth, and back, and forth (all the while with my H/H way way back at max range) until the Healer was in an easier position to get to (instead of hiding out in the back), at which point I did the same as the above.
I also managed to corner block some of them, and healers just don't have a hope of outhealing the AOE damage of splinter weapon. Even strength of honor auto-attacks are pretty hard for them to outheal if anything else is going on.
Really no other fights of note in the dungeon, and it was an extremely fast run. The boss fight was just silly due to 2 smiters. Honestly it was harder in normal mode when I did that two weeks ago and didn't have any smiting skills equipped.
Ok, since I just purchased the new upgrade to Vegas 9, I decided to render a couple of clips just for the hell of it. I didn't think of fraps'ing anything until I was mostly done though, I wish I had some more interesting fights. Two of these are fighting regular 1 healer stone summit groups on floor 2, and the last fight is the boss on floor 3.
I do apologize for having consumables active on floor 2; I did this after wiping once when running head in to the big mob mentioned above (things were so easy until that point, I just got overconfident and ran head in). I thought that and the rest of the floor would be harder than it was, so I popped some consumables then and there. But as you can see from the video clips, it really was unnecessary, the party health bars were never even close to danger, and I didn't use consumables on floor 3. Never used pain inverter even once, it was a dead skill on my bar.
Oh, there's a small gap at the beginning of the boss fight, for whatever reason it didn't render video but only the sound for that section.
But pretty much every fight went like the ones in the video.
(better watched in HD)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53_0UmnxuNA
