As before with Dread Fortress, <Death and Taxes> will be attempting Hard Mode Dread Palace tonight at 7:30 central time (8:30 eastern, 5:30 pacific). It will be streamed at my twitch channel.

VODS:

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

No real idea, but I'd wager minimum requirement is underworld.

I'd certainly hope so. In my opinion it'd make sense for SM to require 72s and HM to require 75s, but given what we got in Dread Fortress that seems highly unlikely. Dread Palace should require higher tiers of gear then Dread Fortress though. we are facing the Dread Masters after all

I'd certainly hope so. In my opinion it'd make sense for SM to require 72s and HM to require 75s, but given what we got in Dread Fortress that seems highly unlikely. Dread Palace should require higher tiers of gear then Dread Fortress though. we are facing the Dread Masters after all

I was speaking only about hard mode, so we actually disagree. SM drops 72s, it'd be stupid for it to require what it drops.

I was speaking only about hard mode, so we actually disagree. SM drops 72s, it'd be stupid for it to require what it drops.

Ah my bad didn't realize that it dropped 72s. That would indeed be stupid. Ah well thanks for the info

Here's the vod for day one.

We killed the first two bosses and nearly killed Calphayus. He's definitely bugged in a few minor ways (20% push doesn't work right, you can see we stopped dps and had only the tanks on him to make sure the portals show up). We either couldn't figure out what to do for the last phase beyond grabbing the holocron and putting it on a table in the present (which wipes the future) or there's something bugged about it. Would appreciate input from other guilds who have made it this far.

When I watched your dread fortress stream, I really admired that you kept so cool when everyone was talking while you tried to explain the boss mechanics. Thumbs up.

Looking forward to the video.

Here's the vod for day two.

We killed Calphayus with a, in my opinion, better way to cheese around his end-fight bugs rather than trying to burn him 18-20% during a single knockdown. You send either a tank and healer or both tanks to the future during the last phase. These people are meant to position him and survive until he does Endless Torment - which they likely won't survive, but it doesn't matter, because the rest of the raid knocks him down with the object and when he gets up he's no longer immune and does very very little melee damage (our dps tanked him).

On Raptus, our tanks were getting obliterated by slash attack, for much higher damage than what DILIH tanks said they were taking. On my PT I was getting hit for 19k and change, our assassin was taking anywhere from 20-25k. This attack was always followed up one second later by another for identical damage. We seemed to find a workaround toward the end involving taunting during Raptus' big backswing but something was wrong with our encounter and we can't figure out why we were getting hit so much harder than the tanks of other groups.

(Yes, we had the tank curse, which seemed to be working inasmuch as it granted me 5% bonus armor in addition to the armor granted by the merc buff)

Posted this in the PTR forum but thought i'd post it here too.

Yeah given my armor values in the character sheet and the average hit in the start before the teleport versus the hits i took once i had the crystal buff I'd say the crystal buffs were not applying correctly and any reduction in damage taken was attributable to the merc armor increase buff or my defense proc relic, in any case no where near the armor increase specified by the buff.

In the end we just had to rotate cool downs and not take the boss if none were available (unless the jugg was knocked back since the knock up came a few seconds later so it didn't really matter). The lower hits were due to only taking him with cooldowns or adrenal/relic.

Tanking him without cool downs was a death sentence for us, doubly so with a healer ported to the bridge (granted our op was in 66/69 gear but 19-22k hits repeatedly even if we had the best healing in the world would burst us down).

As a PT tank i finally know how an assasin feels since i had a streak of 4 attempts where my effective shield/defence was around 10% according to parsec, less than a third of my actual chance to do so.

On the big cleave we either hydraulic override soaked it or tried to run through him (not always possible with PTS lag and required a taunt swap to control his positioning).

All in all, if the crystals are broken the boss needs a slight buff. If they arent maybe a slight nerf to compensate for guilds without a jugg tank with thier plenthora of cool downs.

Here's the VOD for day 3.

Calphayus seems to be fixed and in satisfactory working order. Raptus is pretty easy now.

As to the dread masters, we think we know a lot of the fight. We're double tanking raptus and calph, solo tanking bestia. The problem we were running into was execution on tank swaps (and class deficiency inasmuch as assassins don't have a charge). We're considering 3 tanking the encounter on sunday just for an easy way to see the rest of the phases and to see if there's an enrage.

Here's the vod for day 4.

I've cut the first four fights from the boss because they're in all the other vods (and we had a series of dumb wipes on Raptus that I never want to see again). This vod is all about the last encounter. I think our strat is coming together but we need better execution, I know I made mistakes of my own.

Would still like input from other guilds on this boss.