User:Ventaurion/ProjectProbalt/TequatlFalling

“

I’m willing to bet someday when people get really good at him, less than 80 people will be able to pull it off, that tends to be how anything works in an MMO.

It’s balanced for 80 average players though.

— Colin Johanson, September 02, 2013

What

Finish the first phase of Tequatl in record time (14:13), with minimal players (15).

Destroy Tequatl with 47 players by 13:15 of the event timer.

How

Rather than take well-established, proven strategies and simply try to execute them better, we began at fundamentals and started by looking at the mechanics of this event. Some little-known aspects of this event were discovered, which shaped our resulting strategy.

Mechanics

Scaling

After some experimentation, we've determined that Teq can burn down quite fast when there's few players in the event area, as long as most/all of them are contributing the best damage they can.

Hylek Turrets

The turret 4 skill gives quickness. Each application targets 15 players. The quickness stacks up to 68 seconds. We partitioned players into groups of 15 and pre-stacked quickness before Tequatl landed.

Hardened Scales

Teq gains one stack of scales every 3 seconds. This means, without any turret operators, he summons a bone wall 63 seconds into the event. TxS has demonstrated it is possible to enter the battery defense phase within 60 seconds. Therefore, turret operators are unnecessary. Consequently, hills and boat defense teams are also unnecessary. In fact, the bone wall has so little HP that it is not a big deal even when it does spawn.

For the full kill, we stuck with having turret operators because it wasn't viable to get everybody to fit perfectly into optimal parties.

Teq Attack Pattern

Teq starts with the same 5 attacks every time the event starts. In addition, there are only 2 variations to his next few attacks. This means we know exactly what to expect for the first 55 seconds of the event, and have highly predictable behavior for the next half minute. Consequently, the first minute of the event can be planned to the highest detail.

Mobs

The first wave of spawns can be ignored if we transition to battery defense phase before 14:00 (one minute into the event).

For the full kill, we deal with the first wave during the battery defense phase. Tequatl dies before the next wave at 12:30.

Fingers

The finger attacks bear special mention because a single attack that gets through will wipe the whole group. We made sure the initial wave of projectiles from fingers were all reflected back, which would end up killing each finger. Then we don't need to worry about them for the remainder of the first phase.

Strategy

15 players

We decided to go with 15 players to take full advantage of quickness from the turrets. 13 players were fully stacked with quickness before the event started.

For the first minute, everyone stacked at the cleave location. Knockdown effects were countered with stability. Projectiles were neutralized by walls of reflection. One player moved off stack and forced the bloated creepers to explode away from the stack. We expected to enter the battery defense phase within the first minute.

Besides stacking quickness, there were no turret operators. There were no hills or boats defense teams.

Full kill

The initial phase is executed exactly as the 15-player proof-of-concept. Anyone who couldn't fit into a specific party was a turret operator. Every player was pre-assigned to a specific battery defense location.

Party Composition

Eles can output the most damage in a one-minute interval. Each party needed 1 guardian for the stabilities. Replacing one ele with a warrior resulted in less individual damage but more group damage due to Empower Allies and Banner of Strength.

Our attendance for the 15-player phase 1 proof-of-concept

	Party 1	Party 2	Party 3
Guardian	Vent	Gulag	Kazu
Warrior	Eury	Inari	Veron
Elementalist	Cele	Levi	Narokh
Elementalist	Pengu	Kyriellis	Niyoth
Elementalist	Cheese	Nik	Eilus

We used similar (3 ele, 1 warrior, 1 guardian) parties for the full kill.

Videos

15-player proof-of-concept for phase 1.

Full kill in collaboration with Attuned

Bad Ideas We Ditched

• We tried a team of 4-5 eles dedicated to constantly keep swirling winds active. Not only was that a nightmare to coordinate, these players were unable to effectively contribute damage.
• We tried having 1-3 turret operators in order to delay bone wall from spawning. These players would inevitably wipe from the mobs that spawned.
• We avoided summonables such as the Fire Elemental Powder because if they get targeted by fingers, the whole group wipes. However, these are still fine for subsequent burn phases

Thanks

A few players deserve special mention for making this possible:

• Levi and Narokh worked out the builds and damage rotation for squeezing out every bit of damage from our eles.
• Levi quite often played the role of "bad cop", keeping participants attentive and refusing to waste time on bad strategies.
• Veron noticed Teq has a predictable attack pattern which allowed us to have a specific plan for the first minute of the event.
• Hector and Belle provided some guild spawns while we were still experimenting.
• Twilight, Courin, and all the rest of Attuned demonstrated superb coordination and patience during this collaborative speedkill.

History

The 15-player proof-of-concept was accomplished before the Specialization/Condi update on June 23rd.

The full kill occurred on July 29th, 2015. Between the proof-of-concept and this kill, world boss health was doubled, but could be affected by critical hits. There were 4 attempts before this (on 5/27, 6/3, 6/10, and 6/17) that had varying degrees of success.