I seriously hate this guy.
He’s big, he’s blue, he’s butt-ugly, and he’s humiliated me and my guildies in the Knights of Mercy more times than we can count. He’s the elite version of the Ur-Draug, last boss in the Polaris instance in The Secret World.
No boss has given us half so much trouble in any of the other elite dungeons, but we always seemed to hit a roadblock with him. For weeks, he had been wiping us time and time again, and nothing we ever did seemed to make a smidgen of a difference. Making sure we had stacks of debilitation on him – check. Saving all our emergency cooldowns for when the big damage comes in – check. Giving back-up heals a try – check. Positioning, deck changes, switching roles – check, check, check.
NOTHING worked. NOTHING ever stopped him from handing all our asses back to us on a silver platter.
And here’s the annoying thing: we would do amazingly well on him for the first few tries, before wiping for whatever reason. No big deal, so we brush ourselves off and go again.
But the kicker is, instead of improving our performance, we always seemed to do worse with each subsequent attempt. That’s exactly what happened to our group last night, through no fault of our group, I might add; everyone was bringing their a-game. No, I’m talking absolutely no chance at all to beat Mr. Tentacle-Face, to the point where he would just one-shot me, the hapless tank, as soon as I engaged.
To say he hit like a Mack Truck would be a gross understatement. According to my combat log, his cleave got me for 16,000 on one attempt, and it only got worse. 18,000 on another attempt, then 19,000. Okay, sure, it’s penetrating damage, but can you seriously expect any tank in this game to survive these crushing numbers? At most, I’m sitting on about 13,000 HP. I mean, we’re not even in Nightmare Mode here.
Finally, we decided this had to be more than just plain bad luck, and that something wonky clearly had to be going on here. In a last-ditch effort, I decided to exit to Agartha, then run back into the dungeon, hoping that in doing so something might reset on my character or in the instance, because quite frankly, the abuse we were taking from badass Cthulhu here was getting pretty ridiculous. And since we were sure we were doing everything we could correctly, well…it had to be the game, right?
And stay down.
I honestly didn’t think it would work. But wouldn’t you know it, as soon as I got back, we got him down on the very next attempt. With only four people too, since one of our DPS went down accidentally right at the start. Not only did the Ur-Draug not one-shot me anymore, he didn’t even do enough damage to make our healer break a sweat. In fact, the fight became disgustingly trivial.
So what the hell was going on? I still don’t know, but whatever the problem was, it acted almost like an invisible debuff on the player, or a buff on the boss, which applied itself only after about the third wipe or so on him. Exiting the dungeon and coming back in seemed to fix it, at least for me. I don’t know why we haven’t encountered this problem on the Ur-Draug before now, but then again, we’d always gotten him down within the first or second attempts on all our previous successful runs of Elite Polaris, so I guess you could say we never got the chance to see him go all weird like this.
So the moral of the story is: Try not to wipe — at least, not more than 2-3 times anyway. (Unfortunately but also highly amusing for us, it has become somewhat of a running joke that the motto of Knights of Mercy is “Let’s Wipe It.”) Hopefully, this post might be of help to others if they ever find themselves stuck in such a situation with the Ur-Draug. I don’t know for sure if it’s a bug, but I’ve given Funcom a heads up about it all the same.
And if it is a bug, well…it’s gotta be one of the strangest and the cruelest I’ve ever experienced.
MMO Gamer Chick 