Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Lessons from Flame Leviathan Hard Mode

Here are a few things we learned while attempting Flame Leviathan (FL) with several towers up the other night (our best attempt: 25% with two towers up).

- The Freya tower is probably the hardest one since it introduces adds (one big one, then medium ones and then small ones). These adds change the dynamic of the fight radically so I suggest destroying this tower first.

- The Hodir tower slows down everyone and occasionally ice tombs players, who need to be freed by rockets quickly.

- The Thorim tower creates a beam that damages people around it and also increases the damage that Leviathan deals.

- Only Mimiron's tower beam goes along a predictable path, the other two seem to follow one person for a little while, they stop and then cause damage.

- Because of everything that's happening with additional towers, you can't expect to do the "kite clockwise" strategy. The fight becomes a lot more chaotic and while it's recommended to try to kite along a clockwise/counter-clockwise path, kiters need to do whatever they can in order to dodge beams as well.

- As a consequence of the previous point, motorcycles need to adjust very quickly by trying to predict where the kiter is going and then lay an oil slick on FL's path. Lighting up these slicks with the rockets is more important then ever.

- Flame Vents need to be interrupted at all costs, and because of the high enery cost of Electroshock, Siege Engine drivers should use the same strategy as we did during Malygos: wait for your energy to pool over 60% before you Ram, so that you can cast an Electroshock immediately if FL starts casting Flame Vents. Interrupting seems a bit flaky: ofentimes, it seems to go off (you see the blue arc) but doesn't interrupt.

- Passengers of Demolishers need to pick up Pyrite in-between launches. So far, we have given priority to launching them in order to maximize Overload times, but we probably need to balance this more with 2+ towers. The cycle should look like "Pick up 5 pyrites, get in position to be launched, launch, Overload, picked up by motorcycle, get back into a Demolisher, pick up pyrite, etc...". In short: don't get launched before you have reloaded 5 Pyrites (note: I haven't verified this in the field, it's just something we should try).

- If the Hodir tower is up, everybody gets slowed down, which means that everyone needs to start backing off earlier during Overload or they will quickly be caught up by FL.

2 comments:

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