Logs:
Stacking pulls and downPreparation
Requirements- Comp: one tank, one hunter (or class with aggro reset) and one warlock (for survivability).
- Damage: berserk is 12 minutes with 1 minute of RP. It requires 6.81M dps.
- Survivability: the tank will get at 20+ stacks of the Scythe. For the buff stacking process full defensive is suggested, but for the kill I still used dps trinkets.
DifficultyStrategy design: we quickly went to the stacking strat since berserk didn't work. Given that tries lasted 40-50 minutes, we did a lot of theorycrafting. All in all, this was less complicated than some other bosses to design.
Strategy execution: the strategy execution is not very hard for experienced dps, but Rextroy had a very hard job tanking 20+/40 stacks. For the buff stacking an error of 2 seconds on my part could mean having to restart from scratch. Survival is an issue in the later phases though.
The strategy wasn't completely finished yet when it came to the number of stacks and phases 3 and 4, but we got him like this with 0.2 seconds to spare, so it's a win :)
The fight
Pre-stacking:
- In order to reach the dps requirements, we fought Argus without getting him to phase 2 until the room was filled with fog. During this time, the warlock wasn't present since if there are only two players the haste/versatility buff goes on the dps and the other on the tank.
- The tank had to survive 20+ stacks of scythe, luckily it sometimes resets. He used full defensive gear for perfect uptime on his mitigation - he had 957 ilvl gear (his best is 976) in order to have 23% crit 31% haste and 80% SOTR. If he died I had to rez him immediately, then reset boss to be safe.
- The hard part was the boss reset. As soon as we got the 5-second buff countdown, tank would suicide. Once he was dead, I would immune, grab the buff and FD immediately. Then drop a tar trap to pull the boss the instant he respawned.
- We went for 55 stacks since we wanted him down in 2 minutes. We should have gone for 60 to be safe. As a hunter, I wouldn't have gained much dps anymore going over 65, since at that moment kill command's cooldown is exactly 2 GCDs.
Phase 1 and 2: we actually got them on our very first pull, but they are long. With the buff stacking strat, we used 20M dps to get over it quickly.
Phase 3: dps will take a lot of damage - Rextroy was healing me. When the weapon adds activate, Rextroy couldn't tank forever (without Heroism), and even with a soulstone there was a risk of multiple deaths. The strat we devised was to have my turtle tank the sword add for around 40 seconds while Rextroy and Yenko killed the other with Heroism.
As it turns out, during our down I didn't grab aggro fast enough but according to Rextroy with Heroïsm it was a piece of cake since he had 100% uptime on his mitigation. Adds will nuke the dps and their cast still needs to be interrupted, so I had to be careful with y survival - it's the main reason I went with double defensive legendaries.
If we had wiped next try I wouldn't have used turtle at all and we would just have Hero'd and killed dagger add. And Rextroy would have tanked the armed adds on a third one for dps.
Phase 4: same as in normal, but we have a lot of rezzes in the tree. I split the orbs with Yenko - he could have done all of them, but he had to keep running around because of falling embers. Spellwarding can kill block one soul bomb. Dps must try to survive as much as possible to avoid losing dps, and Rextroy survived 40 stacks because he's that skilled. We elected to ignore the last orbs and just grab the rez, but it nearly killed Rextroy.
In the end, we got him with 0.5 seconds before a 8M cast - just in the nick of time.
If we redid it, we would stack more buffs to avoid hitting berserk, dps orbs less and if we ignored orbs Rextroy would have used bubble.