How would you rate the hateful entity's difficulty compared to the other NiM bosses?

 

In all honesty, it depends on what standpoint you are looking at for this fight in comparison to others. From my own personal healing standpoint, I felt that the Dread Guards in their original release (pre-enrage nerf, pre-damage/health nerf) was the toughest fight in all the 2.0 Nightmare content and beyond. That being said however, this fight is hard to heal, and sadly it is not because the fight itself is "challenging," but rather just stupid with all of the RNG elements thrown in.

 

People got stuck in walls and glitched through the world, Dread Touch threw players in random directions, cleansing for the Deathmark fell at just the wrong time when you would be stunned - a lot of elements played into making this fight hard.

 

Still, none of this is to say the fight is easy without these elements, but rather it just isn't that well designed. It is still a very strict DPS check for all the 75 gear we had, and from the video you can clearly see tanking the fight was no walk in the park either. Personally, it comes down to taste.

 

People got stuck in walls and glitched through the world, Dread Touch threw players in random directions, cleansing for the Deathmark fell at just the wrong time when you would be stunned - a lot of elements played into making this fight hard.

 

 

So it's still pretty buggy?

Gratz on the kill and world first!

Big congratulations!

So it's still pretty buggy?

 

Yep. The most fun bug in my opinion was one that could leave a memeber of your group unable to target the boss at all. On our last 3 pulls of the boss one of the dps saw the boss fall through the floor and couldn't damage it for the last ~2min of the fight. You can hear it on the video as we're leaving the cave, one of our gunslingers saying "it happened again".

 

In my opinion this was the hardest fight of the tier, at least for 16 man. Even though our kill may have been easier on the healers than NiM DG was (although if you ask the other 4 they may disagree with Ren), that was because we brought 5 healers, meaning the single tank had an incredibly stressful job dropping every lightning. After our hours of one-tank attempts, I'm in awe of the concentration Thin and Jiico had to pull it off. The positioning and movement requirements were also more demanding than any other fight I've done in this game, especially at the end when standing in the wrong spot and getting pulled into lightning meant you're as good as dead.

 

Something else noone's mentioned is that this fight is incredibly unforgiving to a generic raid comp. We had 7 of our 10 dps able to self cleanse and only one tank, so only 4 people needed to be cleansed. We had to do this because the debuff graphics didn't load quickly enough for healers to determine who needed to be cleansed first, only who needed to be cleansed at all. If 5 people needed to be cleansed we often lost one to the death mark, just because we couldn't see who to prioritize quickly enough.

Edited September 26, 2013 by namesaretough

No question in my opinion this was the hardest 16 man fight I have been a part of in 2.0. The amount of little things that could go wrong resulting in a wipe was by far more then any other fight.

Congrats Severity on the kill! Awesome job all!

I would fight that thing JUST for the mask (forget the mods). I've wanted a Dread Master Mask since they first came out.