Champion Muchstalker bounty mechanics

[Esprit Dumort.3109]

Anet, can you fine tune some of the mechanics of Champion Muchstalker, please, to be more pug friendly?

 

Champion Muchstalker and Dhael Skyspeaker share a special place in the hearts of us bounty hunters, for their great anti-pug mechanics. I'm sure those familiar with these two are triggered at this point.

 

Muchstalker is a bounty in The Desolation that starts getting a "Petrified" buff with a Breakbar that regens 2% (of max health) per second at 80% health. This requires lightning fast CC followed by as much DPS as you can muster (for the 4 second Exposed debuff). At that point, from what I can tell, that Petrified buff starts being spammed at least every 7-8 seconds. So, every 10 seconds it can heal 10% of its total health if you fail to CC the Breakbar in that time.

 

Again... as far as I've seen, because I have yet to get the Champ below 75% health in any of the fights.

 

Add the blue bounty buffs that are randomly given, then you have even more hilarity. Last try, we got Exploiter (melee to Identify Weakness) and Scorcher (fire fields every 10s), which meant tons of downed players and a lot less DPS.

 

From what I understand, this boss requires fast reacting CC spam with high DPS to counter the Petrified regen buff... something that even organized guilds would have difficulty with, let alone players picked up in LFG.

 

If someone has suggestions on the mechanics, please correct me, otherwise I will fight Legendaries all day long, as they are much easier than this boss, including Rubedon in Vabbi!!

[Hairaky.6739]

Here's how we killed him with a small group of people after numerous painful attempts.

1. Have a decent combo (no Stop/Go, no Stand Where Arrow Points, no Healing Coalescences etc.) like... poison fields and maybe lasers, something that doesn't stop you from ccing and damaging.

2. Have everyone slot lots of CC.

He does the healing every 20%. Therefore, DPS till 80% then there's a small animation of him stopping everything and slowly laying down (at that point as a Thief i ready my basilisk venom) and then you CC him asap. Then, you need to get him under 79%. If you fail to get him under 79%, he will repeat this healing until you do.

Then from 78% to 60% you're free to DPS again and at 60% bring CC again.

Basically you CC, DPS, and be ready to immediatelly CC again if he got over the 80% 60% 40% 20% mark.

But yes. He's broken.

And Dhael? Dhael is even worse, you can't stop his healing ;-; i still need him..

[nekretaal.6485]

Muckstalker is busted/bugged/broken right now. The boss scales really badly. At some point, there will be a fix.

 

If you want to get your achievement done now before the fix,

 

(1) make a party specifically for this bounty.

(2) Make sure everybody alters their build to bring more CC for the boss (no snowflakes allowed). (Bring CC you would never use otherwise like spectral grasp to increase your ability to CC).

(3) Then limit your party to 9-10 people so that scaling does not get out of control.

 

I never noticed an issue with any other bounty other than muckstalker (except maybe the Ooze which 1HKOs 75% of everybody when its health gets low).

[Kiza.5630]

> @Hairaky.6739 said:

 

> And Dhael? Dhael is even worse, you can't stop his healing ;-; i still need him..

 

Got annoyed with him and put up an LFG "Skyspeaker bounty, zerg style". Filled to 50 in no time and he exploded.

 

Muckstalker is my last bounty though. I tried with every group size, 5 to 50. Worked best with ~10 ppl, but we ran out of time at 40% health. At this point I don't bother anymore and just ignore this bounty.

 

But thanks for mentioning the 80, 60, 40, 20% marks. It always felt kinda random when he used petrified, sometimes only seconds after the phase before. Probably 80%, 83%, 80%, repeat. This sounds like adding in internal CD on his heals would fix the whole thing.

[Auri.1365]

I did this boss yesterday with some guildies (we were 8 people). We didn't know about the mechanics, but started cursing at the one who choose it as soon as we reached 80% :)

Nevertheless we started focusing on cc and tried to burst him down after each cc. It took some time, but in the end, we killed him successfully.

 

Today I did some legendaries (with a zerg) for a collection and they seemed to be way more difficult than the legendaries I did with just 8-15 people. I think most bosses are easier with just a few people that know how to cc.

It's also easier to see the mechanics (like the laser-beams) if you don't have that many effects and people around the boss.

[TheOrlyFactor.8341]

I've beaten Muckstalker twice with full bounty trains but it was no easy feat. Like others have said, you need to have a boatload of CC's (preferably hard) but you also have to make sure you have enough DPS to take out the health it regains AND drop it below those points. As usual, condi is king. Complain about the condi meta all you want but there's a reason why it's meta and that's because it works.

 

I do agree though that it certainly seems bugged the way it regains health like it does. It's even worse if it has the Phase Shift boon because you can't reliably hard CC it when you're expected to be outside of the phase shift ring.

[AngelMouse.7345]

Revisiting this thread to say this boss is still broken. It's the last one I need. Please fix it ;(

[zombyturtle.5980]

I was doing this boss with a full zerg and we were having trouble on the way to failing until people explained the stop/go and CC mechanics and then suddenly he started to die smoothly. I think people just dont understand the stop/go and it lowers dps.

[TheOrlyFactor.8341]

> @zombyturtle.5980 said:

> I was doing this boss with a full zerg and we were having trouble on the way to failing until people explained the stop/go and CC mechanics and then suddenly he started to die smoothly. I think people just dont understand the stop/go and it lowers dps.

 

The phase shift boon on Muckstalker pretty much makes it impossible to do as well, even with people who know the mechanics. Taking everything else into consideration in terms of its mechanics, throwing in the phase shift boon means very unreliable CC and DPS delivery, especially when you're expected to range him because you can't melee him until the circle allows you to go back into melee range.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I couldn't beat it either while commanding a squad. The problem was that it kept going into the healing phase after we broke its bar, no matter how fast we did it. Once he hit 80%, he would just spam petrify. Now, getting a group of random players to break his bar once is easy. Twice, not as easy. Three times, nearly impossible. Everybody in this 15 man squad spammed every CC they had, and it just wasn't enough.

[Zenith.7301]

Breakbars in general get broken in scaling when you exceed ~20 people.

 

If you pay attention, it's the same thing with the Legendary Destroyers in Draconis Mons. 15-20 people, breaking the bar is no problem. Scaled up to 40-50, the bar pretty much fails to be broken every time.

 

I simply created a squad where I capped at 10 playes and asked that people bring eles and guardians while having a few warriors and mesmers for CC. That's how we downed it. You need massive burst and the fight needs to be downscaled enough for the CC requirement to be viable.

[shmead.4915]

this is still broken as.. SO MANY HEALS AND JSUT CANT DPS IT DOWN WITH PEOPLE ARGH!

[Zaklex.6308]

> @"Zenith.7301" said:

> Breakbars in general get broken in scaling when you exceed ~20 people.

>

> If you pay attention, it's the same thing with the Legendary Destroyers in Draconis Mons. 15-20 people, breaking the bar is no problem. Scaled up to 40-50, the bar pretty much fails to be broken every time.

>

> I simply created a squad where I capped at 10 playes and asked that people bring eles and guardians while having a few warriors and mesmers for CC. That's how we downed it. You need massive burst and the fight needs to be downscaled enough for the CC requirement to be viable.

 

I highly disagree with you, there's a group I belong to that regularly takes down all PoF bounties with a full squad of 50. We've been doing this for weeks now, 3 different maps a night, and only rarely do we fail to kill them. This is all bounties, Champions and Legends, we do each one once, complete the map and move on...once everyone understands to use CC's when the bar is blue/greenish blue, it almost become a joke. I've personally seem both Dhael and Muckstalker taken down in less than 3 minutes.

 

I won't speak for Draconis Mons but I think the situation would be the same, as long as people understand when to use their CC and save it then there would be no problem whether you had 25 or 45 people.

 

P.S. - If anyone is interested just search any of the PoF maps around 5:30 EST or 6:30 EST, every day except Friday.