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.

[Keybreaker]

Awesome job guys!

[dredre9987]

Very awesome.

[Faent]

You completed tiles in 37 seconds? Holy moly.

[ChadB123]

I could have told you Vareesa was gonna die...

Grats you two! Do you guys have fvs lvls???? I know you have to.....!!!1111!!

[WruntJunior]

Awesome...I know how you do ice that fast, but tiles that fast is rather impressive. Great job!

[Robai]

Awesome,
+1 of course

[Chette]

Amazing job, I am in awe.

For all the folks that complain the game is too easy, or boring, it's only as easy or boring as you make it Great example of challenging and pushing yourself.

[Carpone]

Awesome accomplishment guys! Glad you were able to succeed before the expansion!

[sirgog]

/bow

This is an impressive achievement indeed.

[ycheese123]

Hah, I was in a group standing outside and saw you guys go in. I said to my friend "I bet they're 2-manning it".

Grats, that is just awesome.

[Anthios888]

Great job! Way to show the world what can be done!

[sirgog]

Really want to see this video posted on Youtube too.

[Vanshilar]

I'm still going through the video but here's some of the results so far. Basically part of the video is the combat log and I can go through that log frame by frame to extract some statistics on the Abbot.

During the main fight (i.e. after the puzzles), I took a total of 12097 points of damage from all sources. The breakdown was:

#attack	#hits	SumDam	%OfAll	Damage
552	349	12097	100.00%	Total
32	0	0	0.00%	chain lightning
31	4	288	2.38%	delayed blast fireball
31	31	1567	12.95%	disintegrate
36	36	1215	10.04%	encase
13	13	0	0.00%	exhaust
53	53	0	0.00%	greater dispel magic
56	55	5710	47.20%	horrid wilting
3	3	615	5.08%	inferno
31	31	993	8.21%	negative energy touch
33	1	74	0.61%	otiluke's freezing sphere
31	0	0	0.00%	paralyzing touch
21	1	0	0.00%	symbol of weakness
175	115	1533	12.67%	phasing wraith damage
4	4	59	0.49%	quell damage
2	2	43	0.36%	wheep damage

As you can see, by far the largest component of the damage was from horrid wilting, taking up 47.2% of all my incoming damage, with disintegrate at second place with 13.0% and phasing wraiths in third place with 12.7%. On this run, I was lucky with a few spells and unlucky with some others, though; for example, I made all 31 disintegrate saves (didn't roll a 1 on any of them), which only has about a 1 in 5 chance of happening. But I failed 4 out of 31 fireball saves.

The reason is that horrid wilting will do 100 damage even if you make your save (and 200 damage if you don't), and it's an area of effect spell, meaning that when the Abbot targets Nix with it, it'll often hit me as well (and vice versa). In a larger group setting, disintegrate is single-target (and can be dodged if you're at range since it's a ray-based spell), but a horrid wilting on the melee ball surrounding Abbot will likely hit all the melees. In contrast, disintegrate only does about 50 damage (and on a single target) when the victim makes his save, although it does about 400 damage if the victim fails his save, and most of the other spells like delayed blast fireball and chain lightning will do no damage on a successful save with evasion even though they're area-based. This is using a character with very high saves though (only fail on a 1), so the proportions will change depending on a particular character's saves.

Hence originally, the plan was to do it with my warforged monk just because that's what I had at the time, but testing after horrid wilting was changed showed that it meant far too much incoming damage. TRing into human meant that I could hit over 300% healing amp (although I had to use jidz + fire stance to do so), so that became the path to doing this. Anyone running Abbot should be aware of the increase in damage output post-U13 now due to horrid wilting, although the best solution is to simply make sure each member of the group has good saves.

You completed tiles in 37 seconds? Holy moly.

Tiles can be completed very quickly with practice. In this run it was particularly fast though; on this run ice was slower than usual and tiles was faster than usual (we probably overcompensated for ice taking a bit longer than usual). Asteroids of course took the same amount of time that it always does.

As I've mentioned before, such as here, in guild runs the bottleneck is usually asteroids, not tiles. People who come on the forums and claim that they wait 10-20 minutes or whatever for tiles are either exaggerating or running with (or are) people who haven't really spent enough time getting their tiles speed down. If it's the latter case, then I don't know why people are willing to spend that much time waiting on every Abbot run when they could just spend a bit of time practicing tiles until they can consistently have it done quickly. If someone wouldn't be willing to wait 10-20 minutes for someone to solve their puzzle in Shroud part 3, I don't see why they'd be willing to wait 10-20 minutes for someone to solve their puzzle in Abbot.

The puzzle that we had the most trouble with was asteroids. A good deal of our runs ended because of invisible asteroids or indestructible asteroids or whatever. Certainly there's some strategies we've tried to get around them (since we suspect it's a server-client desync issue), but none have really been all that successful. In the end, rather than having each person take a 180 degree field (which is sort of what you'd expect with 2 people), we both took the entire 360 degree field at times, so that if one guy's client is desynced and not showing an asteroid, at least hopefully the other guy will catch that asteroid in time. I might post some videos of that eventually but it may take a while for me to sort through and rewatch them.

In fact the original plan was to do this on elite; both of our characters are spec'ed for elite (our saves are high enough to no-fail except on 1 even on elite), but the asteroids on elite was giving us problems, so we decided to downgrade to hard first. Asteroids do definitely seem to scale by difficulty, so that's probably one of the things that did stay activated when Phax messed around with the Abbot script in U13, if it wasn't already there before that. It's fine with 4 people, but when there are only 2 people in there, it's more important that each boulder throw is a kill, and that's difficult to do when you can't be certain if your hit on your client really is a hit on the server side (resulting in invisible asteroids if it wasn't), or if that indestructible asteroid really is an asteroid that's actually destroyed on the server but not according to your client, or if it's just lag and the server hasn't registered your throws yet.

Doing this on elite is just using the exact same strategy as this run on hard, with the exceptions that Abbot will do 25% more damage with his spells (so we have to be a bit more conservative and less aggressive) and that his AC is high enough that I may need to turn off power attack (resulting in a longer fight). The major sticking point however is asteroids due to the invis/indestruct issues, hence doing it on hard first to make sure at least that's done before the expansion. We'll have to see if we have better luck with elite this weekend.

I was sort of disappointed that they changed the tiles back shortly after U13 though, because we still would have been able to do tiles with a moderate amount of success (although with a higher fail rate) in the same amount of time, in contrast to all the naysayers on the forums. The change to horrid wilting made it moot, however, since I wouldn't have lasted through the initial fight as a warforged to get to the puzzles.

Really want to see this video posted on Youtube too.

The video is just over 35 minutes long and is 1.36 GB in size. It's also poor quality, since I use it mostly for the combat log so all the graphics settings are turned way down (it's blocky, the animation is choppy, etc.). It wouldn't make for good video, (and I'm not sure how well Youtube takes to videos that are that long and of that size), although I may post bits here and there (mostly of the asteroids). At any rate like most videos that I take, it's more for data analysis rather than to view per se so I don't have plans to post it publicly. Incidentally the video shows that the actual raid completion time was 35 minutes and 7 seconds, so if we had been just a bit faster, the completion time would've read as 34 minutes instead. Oh well.

[Wraith_Sarevok]

How did you manage to do 3 puzzle rooms with only 2 people?

[WruntJunior]

How did you manage to do 3 puzzle rooms with only 2 people?

One monk can quickly do ice no problem...tiles I can think of two ways (incredibly fast teamwork or a different, somewhat cheap tactic). For roids, 2 good people can do it better than most sets of 4 pugs...the challenge in all of this is getting tiles done quickly enough , after doing ice as well, to have both people in roids within the time constraint (90 seconds I believe).

The tile time, if done through teamwork, is amazingly awesome though...even without, to get all 3 puzzles in one round is awesome (and more than I expect from pug groups :P).

[brzytki]

How did you manage to do 3 puzzle rooms with only 2 people?

Read first paragraph.

[Vanshilar]

How did you manage to do 3 puzzle rooms with only 2 people?

One monk can quickly do ice no problem...tiles I can think of two ways (incredibly fast teamwork or a different, somewhat cheap tactic). For roids, 2 good people can do it better than most sets of 4 pugs...the challenge in all of this is getting tiles done quickly enough , after doing ice as well, to have both people in roids within the time constraint (90 seconds I believe).

The tile time, if done through teamwork, is amazingly awesome though...even without, to get all 3 puzzles in one round is awesome (and more than I expect from pug groups :P).

Tiles took quite a bit of practice to be able to do quickly. Although we considered just brute-forcing using the cheap tactic (which was especially tempting because the time to run across would only be around 10 seconds instead of the 40-50 seconds that we typically needed) it would have meant a lot of restarts due to failures (because both of us would need to make it through to not be a failure) which we wanted to keep to a minimum; after all, if either of us ended up in asteroids prematurely that was already an automatic abort and restart, which already meant some wasted time. Being in Over Raided, we both lead busy lives IRL and didn't want to waste too much time on aborts. Instead it meant we spent our time practicing doing tiles quickly rather than trying to brute force it, I guess.

When I started raiding, it always seemed like magic to me that people could just walk into a 5x5 in Shroud part 3 and solve it in 20 seconds, without using a solver or anything. After reading up on how the puzzle worked and practicing a bit, though, I became just as proficient and no longer needed to use a solver (incidentally, the circle puzzle stumped me a month or two back because I haven't been raiding much lately and it had been too long since I had to solve it). The tiles puzzle in Abbot is much the same thing -- it's just a matter of whether people have learned to recognize the patterns or not (and how proficient they are at it), and coordinating leading someone else through it. One unique thing about tiles is that it's dynamic or time-dependent: while the state of most puzzles like Shroud part 3 or Reavers don't change until you change it (static), the state of tiles is constantly changing (dynamic), although the pattern repeats. That is something that you can also take advantage of, though.

Tiles is something that you can actually practice offline, in terms of seeing a layout and then recognizing the time-dependent patterns or sequences that you should use for taking someone through it. I've been working on that but I only have the back-end (i.e. how the timings work) coded, I don't have the front-end (displaying the timings in a similar way to how the puzzle is presented) coded yet. I think once that's done it'll be much easier to visualize and describe strategies for doing tiles quickly. I have no idea when I'll actually be done with that though, but suffice it to say that after looking at the puzzles for a while, not to mention many guild runs, I'm firmly of the belief that people who complain about tiles taking 10-20 minutes or whatever simply haven't sat down and learned how the puzzle works to do it themselves, even though there are already guides out there for it, not to mention many videos of people doing it. Instead most people just say "I'll do roids" and then pike and complain about how the raid is so boring, rather than taking a bit of time to actually figure it out.

We tried doing an elite Abbot prior to the update but unfortunately asteroids wasn't really cooperating, and we had stuff to do so couldn't devote more time to it. We were aware of the work-arounds for buggy asteroids but there was simply too little margin for error when you only have 2 people in on elite: once you encounter a buggy asteroid, you either ignore it and assume that it's your client fooling you (and run the risk of the true cause being that the server didn't register your throw and it being an actual asteroid, thus taking the asteroid damage), or spend time throwing extra boulders at it (and run the risk of other asteroids that you're thus not paying attention to hitting you). When there's 4 people you have enough time to throw extra boulders, but when there's 2 people there's very little time for that. Incidentally I don't recall this being a problem at all when we 2-manned it on normal, but I don't know if it's simply because of the asteroids scaling on harder difficulties (more of them coming at you so less time for each asteroid) or buggy asteroids issues with the Havok physics engine update (or just general server-client desync issues with the code changes in the past few updates), or both. Suffice it to say that we tried it on normal and asteroids was very easy, because we had plenty of time to throw extra asteroids whenever we got a buggy one. Hard, we did have fails due to it but the success rate wasn't too low. I haven't touched the game much at all since the update because of RL so I have no idea how it's been post-update.

It was sort of a disappointment that elite Abbot didn't work out because the strategy and execution plan was pretty much identical to the one for hard, and our characters were actually spec'ed for elite (in terms of saves, HP, to-hit, etc.) -- the hard run was effectively just a proof-of-concept run for elite in terms of the strategies that we used. Oh well.

[Vanshilar]

By the way, I had some spare time today so I took a stroll through Abbot post-expansion.

I haven't read up on the changes in the expansion yet, but whatever they are, they've resulted in a severely buffed up Abbot.

Previously, Abbot had maximize (+100%) on normal and hard, and maximize and empower (+150%) on elite. This meant that on normal and hard, Abbot would do 2x damage (compared with the damage of the spell at the cap of caster level 20) and on elite, Abbot would do 2.5x damage.

For example, disintegrate normally does 6d3+12 (average 24) damage on a save and 40d3+120 (average 200) damage on a fail. So prior to the expansion, Abbot would do ~48 damage on a save and ~400 damage on a fail for normal or hard, and ~60 damage on a save and ~500 damage on a fail for elite. Similarly, for horrid wilting, it's 20d3+60 (average 100) damage, so it is ~100 damage on save and ~200 damage on fail for normal or hard, and ~250 damage on elite.

Well, when I went in there today, it seems like Abbot now does 2.5x damage on normal, 3x damage on hard, and 4.25x damage on elite. In other words, a failed disintegrate will now do 500, 600, and 850 damage (by difficulty), rather than the original 400, 400, and 500. Horrid wilting now does 125/150/212.5 damage on save and 250/300/425 damage on fail.

The saves themselves don't seem to have changed, so it's not precisely that the current normal matches the previous elite in terms of damage (because you're more likely to make your save, since elite saves are higher). However, when you do get hit, the damage that he'll do is much higher now. Also, he seems to have the same amount of HP, at least on hard. I haven't gone through and calculated the HP on other difficulties, but on hard he had between 209858 and 210019 HP; for those of you familiar with the pixel method, the larger HP bar now has 162 pixels instead of the original 148. This is pretty much the same as his HP prior to update 14.

So his HP is the same, but he now hits much harder. I haven't read up on the expansion notes yet but it seemed like with the new combat system, you also won't be doing as much damage due to no longer being able to always hit on a 2 or higher, meaning less DPS (assuming same gear) due to more misses.

In short, Abbot has undergone a hefty increase in damage, and is effectively harder to damage. Consider yourselves warned. I'm glad I got the 2-man Abbot in before the expansion, although I'll likely try again whenever I have time to read up on the changes and level up to 25.

Damage change over expansion

diff	prev	U14	incr
normal	2x	2.5x	+25%
hard	2x	3x	+50%
elite	2.5x	4.25x	+70%

Horrid wilting damage

diff	prev	U14
n save	100	125
h save	100	150
e save	125	212.5
n fail	200	250
h fail	200	300
e fail	250	425

Disintegrate

diff	prev	U14
n save	48	60
h save	48	72
e save	60	102
n fail	400	500
h fail	400	600
e fail	500	850

For those that may be disbelieving, here's a screenshot on elite:



Although this may or may not have been intended, it seems like the developers keep feeling like the fight in Abbot is too easy, since it received the biggest buff from the previous update (from 50k/50k/50k HP to 135k/209k/303k HP), and now does significantly more spell damage and is harder to hit (resulting in taking less damage) with the expansion. I'm not sure if epic destinies or new gear or something is meant to be powerful enough to counter this. I hope Abbot's loot has been buffed up to compensate.

[wax_on_wax_off]

Haven't had any issues with our regular hard runs on Khyber, we either succeed or fail based on puzzles or inferno.

I did cop a 609 point disintegrate in hard though on presumably a roll of a 1 which was nasty, important to have multiple people with ice wands when he's throwing those around.

A few level 25 folks with max EDs is enough to make the end fight a bit of a joke with the damage and buffs they put out.

I haven't had any issues hitting, U13 I needed every bit of AB boost I could get (on my rogue) and I seem to be in exactly the same place post expansion (this is with power attack on, GH, +4 AB shard, 44 to 52 strength, +5 AB handwraps etc). I might pay a little more attention to see if I've gone down to missing on a 2 where before I hit but I think that would be about the only change from what I noticed (maybe a good time for me to craft some better handwraps though).