2-Man Speedrun Melee Hard Abbot -- Over Raided (Orien)

[Vanshilar]

Nix and I completed Abbot on hard tonight:







It was meant as a speedrun with 2 people, i.e. fastest that can be done using just 2 people. So the puzzles were done in one round. We could have gone with either tiles => ice => asteroids or ice => tiles => asteroids, but in this run it was ice => tiles => asteroids, meaning that we'd complete both ice and tiles and enter into asteroids before the ddoors went down (within 90 seconds). The actual timing was that ice took 31 seconds, tiles took 37 seconds, and running through the center etc. took 11 seconds, so we had about 11 seconds to spare before the ddoors went down. The bulk of the raid, of course, was the main fight after the puzzles were done, which took a total of a bit over 26 minutes.

In case you're wondering, the lines on the focus orb are mostly for HP testing reasons; the numbers above indicate the percentage of health remaining, while the numbers below are how many pixels have been removed (to determine monster HP using the pixels removed method described here). The green line to the left of 70% health is to indicate when the Abbot ports during the initial fight.

Ideally it would have been a "potless" run, so no SP pots or SF pots; however Nix did end up using 3 SF pots during emergencies. As for me, I had no choice (I don't have enough silver flame favor) so I obviously didn't use any silver flame pots. Obviously since we were both melees, no SP pots were used. Both of us did use about 100 cure serious pots each though, but generally I think those aren't really considered as consumables in the same way that SP pots or SF pots are. I think if I forced Nix he could use no SF pots too, since I didn't use any as I have no choice so it's pretty doable.

The main strategy was using high saves and (improved) evasion to reduce incoming damage, and vampirism and good healing amp for when we did take damage. In this respect, it was similar to past runs of ToD/VoD for example that use high AC builds. In this case, however, Abbot's damage largely came from spells, and so it was high saves instead (to reduce incoming spell damage) rather than high AC (to reduce incoming physical damage). We would use cure serious pots on the run whenever the Abbot teleported around to improve our healing as well, although it wasn't strictly necessary (as we had vamp wraps), just that it sped things along.

Although I still have to go through the video in detail, I highly suspect that the end result will be that the biggest source of incoming damage was horrid wilting. As I mentioned here, that was the biggest change to Abbot in Update 13 (and not the change to tiles). As pointed out to me in that thread, it was actually obliquely referred to in the release notes (essentially saying "horrid wilting now actually hits"), so it wasn't really a "stealth buff" to Abbot as much as a "very indirectly described buff" to Abbot. If it weren't for this change, we would have been able to do hard/elite Abbot as-is after completing the normal difficulty here, but I was busy with RL stuff until March and by then the change to horrid wilting had already taken place, necessitating a TR from the original warforged to human to have enough healing amp to cover the incoming damage. It's my only TR ever.

It was a lot of fun. Unlike easy raids like EVoN or ELoB, 2-manning Abbot means that you can't just snooze through the raid; you had to actually concentrate on what's going on for the entirety of the raid (although the beginning fight is pretty docile). In this case it meant reacting very quickly whenever someone was encased or when there was inferno, for the entire 26-minute duration of the main fight. Disjunction was also an issue, so I did have an entire secondary set of gear which I would switch around whenever I got disjunctioned.

I'd like for it to have been a flawless run, but there was one death when the Abbot was down to 22% where Nix got encased at 172 HP (after being disjunctioned), and I couldn't get him out in time. We decided to just complete though rather than to recall. We'll have to see if we can make it flawless next time.






The most important thing to note is that Nix got the kill. What a kill-stealer.