Akylios Down

Puremallace

Source: http://www.voodooguild.net/

They said it was a 19min fight and not even posting a strat until other guilds kill him. The kill video would just be insane honestly

No kill video yet obviously, but some of the wipes are just brutal

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXNlrAxpbo8

 

First of all, excellent job to all of our members. This fight requires absolute perfection from all 20 involved, and was many times harder than any of the other fights in Hammerknell.



Funnily enough, he died just 13 minutes shy of being exactly 2 months after our first Murdantix kill. Felt like a lot longer, because unfortunately we've been waiting on hotfixes to the encounter for about 3 weeks now.



3 weeks ago he had a 15 minute enrage timer (instead of 20), and required about 25 minutes to actually kill. The week after that we struggled with tidal waves coming from four different directions, two of which came through the boss' model/tentacles and were extremely difficult (near impossible) for melee and the tank to see. Then the week after that Cerebral Bore was bugged (?) and one-shotting people as soon as it went out. We spent several nights trying all sorts of wild strategy theories, but after exhausting all options we were forced to just wait for another round of hotfixes. The audio is out of sync in this video, but you can see just how ridiculous it was: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXNlrAxpbo8



The fight as it stands now is pretty perfectly tuned, but there are still several bugs and some RNG unhealable damage. We probably would have had a kill last night if not for half of our best attempts being wasted to phase 4 failing to trigger.



Overall I believe we were all very impressed with Hammerknell, and didn't find the bugs that people keep mentioning nearly as bad or demoralizing as some people claim. My main suggestion for future content would be to just officially gate content (release x encounters every x weeks), instead of artificially gating fights by tuning them to the point of making them impossible, which can be incredibly frustrating for guilds investing the time into them.



I love huge instances like Hammerknell (with 11 bosses), but I dread the feeling of having to spend 20-40 hours a week when they're first released just to be competitive. (We never spent that amount of time, but knowing we could have done much better if we had is annoying.) Releasing just Murd/Matron/Zilas the first week would have been perfectly acceptable, and then adding 1-2 bosses every week after that. It's a good way to milk content without angering the playerbase.



Finally, I know Trion has mentioned wanting to implement "hard modes" in the future, but I hope they consider taking the opportunity to implement them right now in Hammerknell. The achievements needed for Conqueror: Hammerknell Fortress could already be used as makeshift hard modes just by adding a cache of loot to some of them. Maybe one relic drop per achievement, or an item level somewhere in between the normal epics and relics in HK.



They'd have to carefully consider which achievements could be used. E.g., I'd hope they'd choose Abyssal Paella over The Perfect Akylios, and Contractual Obligation over Null and Void, but they've already done the majority of the hard work in tuning/coding the achievements... just add some real rewards! It'd also probably be best to require someone in the raid to have the Akylios kill achievement, so guilds don't get sidetracked with those achievements instead of finishing the instance first.



Either way, thanks to Trion for this awesome and extremely fun raid instance. Look for our video and strategy guide (at Rift Strats) to be released after a second guild has killed him.



We are still recruiting, but we are at a point where we can only really consider players that can show us parses of them constantly topping the meters in their previous/current guild, and can guarantee 90%+ attendance. We have to turn down the majority of applicants, so please come prepared with something to set you apart and prove your awesomeness!

Warbs

Awesome

 

 

and 19 minutes DAAAMN!