Trap Damage Mitigation/Avoidance

[Seikojin]

Nice work!

Exactly! Now we need someone to do it without ff.

[Thalone]

Nice work
Also wanted to mention, warforged/bladeforged characters have a racial immunity to natural poison. This includes many, if not all, of the poison traps found throughout the game. Confirmed in Redfang Unruled, Fleshmaker's Lab, and the poison spell wards in Beyond the Rift. It should be noted that the slow effect on the poison spell wards still affects warforged and bladeforged.

Oooooh thanks for pointing this out; added racial/undead immunities to the first post.

I junked my Proof Against Poison items after they nerfed them and have been running through poison wards; weirdly it seems these items don't seem help against these traps despite their description including natural poisons.

[dunklezhan]

There's been hubbub? Must've missed it. we did it last night and all died on the first attempt down the spikes. It was my first run through and didn't know this had been changed. I just always liked the quest and wanted to do it on epic. We rez-caked it rather than releasing and trying again because it was late and we wanted to finish, but before I died on my next-to-nothing reflex save melee, I got down to the last gap first time with only one 'hit'. I misjudged how far away the last gap was and fell between two sets of spikes, which is what did it.

Its crazy difficult. Please keep it that way. This quest SHOULD be very tough, it's a pirate's fiendish trial. If I was to offer a suggestion it would be to allow a sufficiently high search to reveal a chamber with an elevator to the bottom, protected by a sufficiently difficult lock, trap and in need of fixing up with a sufficiently high repair. And I mean like, 'highest difficulty possible for the level' kind of difficulty.Thumbs up from me on the new spike section.



Also, I LOVE the end fight, with the swashbuckler pirate and his insults. Once we got the hang of it, it was kinda trivialised (on Epic Hard), but its a great, hilarious mechanic (for now... after a dozen more runs I'll let you know ), and could be really challenging without someone with the requisite skills and real life reflexes to use them.


Suggestion for player swashbucklers - find some way to give them a UI where they can write say, a 64 character insult to use with their swashbucklery skills. Profanity filters should apply if set in chat, but beyond that, even if you just got ONE custom insult of your very own... oh the awesome. Make sure there's a 'reset to default' so that it can go back to the "official" insult. 'Your bacon smells of soyburger!' or whatever.

[Thalone]

I haven't run a whole lot of Haunted Halls yet, but have been running a character through on standard for familiarisation. (Embarrassing story: I died in the end fight on normal on my WF Sorc. I'd managed to kite myself through a Symbol of Weakness until I was helpless...)

With a party with no trap skills and no search skills, the bottleneck seems to be the double slashing blades on the way to the doppleganger crest ("easily" avoidable by winging through) and the web plates which catch you on the (surprise!) spinning blades just after.

The plates seem to be placed semirandomly. The way to avoid these, from the half dozen or so times I've gone through it, is to examine the floor tiling. Jumping/featherfalling down the middle stripe, landing approximately in the vertical middle of the tiles, seems to be an area clear of the plates.


I'd be interested if people could find a counterexample to this, and how to beat it if so.

[Thalone]

I make sure to run Titan once per life to grab the favour. While it's technically not necessary to run HiPS/Slavers/Ghola every life to flag (having a sigil from a previous life suffices if you can GT), I tend to do max-favour lives, so end up running the flagging quests anyway. Sometimes I even manage to con PUGgers into joining me by posting a long series of at-level quests and putting these at the end.

There's a hallway in Ghola with traps which cannot be disabled, but they're easily bypassed with a buffed Jump:

[Eth]

Is there any good way to avoid the slash traps at the elevator leading up in proove your worth?

[Rys]

Is there any good way to avoid the slash traps at the elevator leading up in proove your worth?

Jumping on the torch works.

[Thalone]

I haven't found a solution to the elevator that satisfies me. Various threads have suggested jumping on the torch, but in my personal experience, this requires wings/abundant step/etc, and not every character is going to have two charges. Additionally, landing on the torch seems very sensitive... often I'll hit my head on the elevator above and lose the required height and get nicked, or I'll land on the torch but the physics engine starts nudging me off (even though I make sure to zero my angle using /loc) and I can't recover in time.

Summons don't seem to trigger the traps, so you can't pre-scout the safe locations with someone expendable.

I've had the elevators go kind of nuts when they're sandwiching, and by jumping, it'll lift my character onto the upper elevator, but this doesn't seem like the intention, and I can't reproduce it consistently.

[Thalone]

I've heard a lot of whoppers about Spies in the House, both reading comments on the forums and in parties. There was a stretch where I was PUGging it out on EE daily, and total strangers would start /telling me I was nuts. There was even one of "those uber players" from one of "those uber guilds" that actually asked me if he could pike it because he was just level 20 and had no Reflex save or Evasion (he was apparently on his Wizard with no Insightful Reflexes)... and then actually piked it!

Well, since this thread is all about avoiding trap damage... Challenge Accepted! I ERed my Cleric (Reflexes don't get much worse than Cleric--forgot to put on a Reflex item and I'm walking around with 12...) and ran through EE solo at level 20. She has no heroic past lives as yet; only two fortification epic lives. She's exceptionally geared at 20, but even so, the Necro DCs weren't autokill in there.

To be honest, it took me about three tries to get it down perfectly, because I usually use a wing clicky to get past the electric trap on the grease ramp, but I was trying to avoid that to illustrate a way of getting through on any class/ED. Luckily, many traps trigger before their damage zone, and this is one such trap.

As it's fairly long, I wouldn't recommend watching this if your goal is to learn the quest (though I do annotate quest highlights); there are numerous zergy runs of Spies already on YouTube (here's a seven-minute one). I also wouldn't recommend watching the entire thing if you're familiar with the quest and just want to see how to deal with the traps, so I'll put in some time ranges here:

• 01:07 Entry
• 04:30 Grease ramp
• 19:55 Jet up: first and second electric floors
• 24:00 Lying gargoyle valves

Apologies in advance for the choppy video; my system evidently can't handle full-screen capturing.

[Thalone]

Minor update to the original post with the PRR/MRR changes this update:

Since Update 23, wearing heavy armour will grant a large PRR bonus even if you have no proficiency. You will additionally get bonus PRR if you are proficient, according to your BAB (you can temporarily set BAB equal to your character level by scrolling Divine Power or Tensor's Transformation). Also, starting with light shields, you will get another PRR bonus with each successively heavier shield type, regardless of proficiency. The related MRR mechanic in the same update means that much the same logic applies to traversing elemental traps. Therefore all characters not confident of their ability to traverse a deadly trap can benefit from having a suit of heavy armour and a tower shield when they attempt to cross a trap zone.

[Ulsio]

Alternatively, you can bring a hireling with res spells on their hotbar (hirelings can cast under water).

Cleric Hires will no longer Rez You while underwater.

[schelsullivan]

Theres a scroll spell for detect traps too. My swashbuckler is being devastated by the traps on elite this TR. Since ive never had a trapper toon I dont have most of the trap locales memorized. I havent tried the detect traps scroll spell yet, is it effective?

[Thalone]

Cleric Hires will no longer Rez You while underwater.

I just tested this by drowning myself in Sunken Sewer. Tempys Lorben raised me without complaint. Possibly what you experienced was quest-based (maybe they nerfed this method in Crucible? Crucibled the Crucibled Crucible?). Or it's another hireling issue in an update full of hireling issues.

Theres a scroll spell for detect traps too. My swashbuckler is being devastated by the traps on elite this TR. Since ive never had a trapper toon I dont have most of the trap locales memorized. I havent tried the detect traps scroll spell yet, is it effective?

It's caster level 2 on a scroll, so only boosts your Search by 1. The only use I've found for it is when I'm doing a trapper life on a Divine. I can cast it from my SP pool to boost Search, and therefore spend fewer skill points on Search when levelling up.

[peng]

Theres a scroll spell for detect traps too. My swashbuckler is being devastated by the traps on elite this TR. Since ive never had a trapper toon I dont have most of the trap locales memorized. I havent tried the detect traps scroll spell yet, is it effective?

The scroll doesn't add much to your search skill. What it does do is allow you to find traps with a dc over 20, which normally require rogue or artificer levels. So a ranger or wizard could invest in search skill points and gear, umd a find traps scroll (or cast it on a cleric or favored soul), and be able to find traps with the search skill. This has no effect on the pop-up that warns you a trap is nearby if your spot is high enough, and it doesn't allow you to disable the trap. This can help you see exactly where a spike trap will pop up, or find a trap for an under-geared rogue/arti party member. Or just to confuse the rogue whose search no longer seems to do anything .

[Thalone]

While MoD tiles isn't exactly what anyone'd call a trap, I had issues surviving the swim when I started running my melees through (I started running it on my CC characters, who would typically do platform duty).

The strategy I use nowadays is not as slow as people plowing forward, but I have good success staying alive.

The forcefield is to the left in the video. There are two lanes of invisible tiles, and the idea is to run the left lane. If you start falling, stop all forward motion so you will be aligned with where the tile will reappear. Strafe to the left as you fall (careful not to strafe past the forcefield) and count off three seconds (the maximum tile-not-present time), then strafe-jump back to the right. Take the time to heal up while you know the tile's going to be solid under you, then start moving forward again.

There's a good illustration of this at 0:13, though I counted off the seconds a little quickly and probably should have waited another second instead of risking an extra tick of water damage. At 0:25, you see I overcorrected when the tile suddenly appeared, but since I was largely going sideways, jumping back onto the tile was easy.

I like keeping to the left lane since it's not flush against the barrier like the right side is with the solid wall. So if I end up in the drink, I won't be bumping my head up against tiles when I try to get back up.



The tile timings seem similar to heroic Abbot (all difficulties), as illustrated in Xyfiel's video. I've generally run MoD on EN (only done EH once and never done EE), so if the timings are different on higher difficulties, I'd be interested to hear it.

[Xahtep]

Good guide.

Just wanted to point that the defensive stance in fighters dont reduce your movement speed, and if you take a certain enhancement from stalwart tree, stance even boosts your speed by 10%. Dont know about pally but i supose it might be a similar case.

[Thalone]

Yes, you're completely correct; +10 Frog points to you. The movement speeds were changed in U23, according to some wiki history.

(Not sure how I managed to missed your reply for a week when I have the thread subscribed...)

[BD_]

Cleric Hires will no longer Rez You while underwater.

I just tested this by drowning myself in Sunken Sewer. Tempys Lorben raised me without complaint. Possibly what you experienced was quest-based (maybe they nerfed this method in Crucible? Crucibled the Crucibled Crucible?). Or it's another hireling issue in an update full of hireling issues.

One time consuming but more or less no fail way to do the swim in crucible if you don't have a swimmer but have a space for a hireling with res is to just die in the swim, summon hire to you, have them grab your stone and wait there - swim up as far as you can to a safe spot and summon hire to you again - repeat til you're at the end and have hire res you before you turn the corner to the mobs.

[cru121]

*bump*
I wonder if anyone could share some insight on the force trap on the bridge in Grey Moon's Den (Sorrowdusk Isle part 3 and 4).

[Rauven]

*bump*
I wonder if anyone could share some insight on the force trap on the bridge in Grey Moon's Den (Sorrowdusk Isle part 3 and 4).

http://ddowiki.com/page/DDO_informat...g.2C_Part_4.29