Kintari

This is the weaver build I have been experimenting with. It's sword + dagger, full viper's on all gear, berserker runes, bursting & malice sigils. With food, both burning and bleeding should be just below condi duration cap. It relies heavily on sword and fire autos, and rotating between fire and earth attunements basically just hitting stuff on cooldown. It's important to swap constantly so that you keep your Elements of Rage uptime high. (Xera: https://youtu.be/ZXx8b11y6wk)

Did some looking over our Deimos CM runs. Observations: 1) A lot of greeds are getting to Saul. On our better runs, Saul is hurting pretty badly, and it's a race against Saul's HP bar (until we screw up a mechanic). 2) Greeds making it to Saul are what mysteriously strip Aegis at times: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/170581913?t=02h25m15s. It is difficult to see with the camera angle, but watch Saul's HP drop half a second before the mind crush goes off, and group 1 takes it in the shorts. I think some adjustments to our strategy to more effectively handle greeds and / or avoid the greed explosions are probably in order.

Question: How did the greed explosion strip aegis if distortion was up? Here are my general thoughts / observations: - Greeds need to either die quickly to cleave damage, or be slowed / immobilized / chilled so they can die more slowly. - During green circle phases, it is probably safe to assume that every greed will make it to Saul and explode. So the best way to minimize damage to Saul during those phases is to burn Saul quickly and return. - It would be good to have a backup plan for the situation pictured here where a greed makes it to the center at the same time as a mind crush. - Prides are a pain in the ass. Having a magi druid managing prides while the rest of the team is in the demonic realm is doable, and also unreliable. They just don't have enough tools and condi duration. Possible exception to this would be a druid that runs sword MH for perma cripple. That doesn't give me the warm fuzzies though. - I feel that having 1 person (with the proper tools) explicitly assigned to pride management would be helpful, and even if their personal dps is low, could result in a net group dps increase by allowing more focus on the boss and less panic. - The ideal 'pride controller' would have access to large amounts of movement speed debuffs that can be applied from range, on low cooldown, and preferably in an AoE so as to also help with greeds. They would also be a condi damage class so that they have the increased duration on these debuffs. They would also have access to hard CC for use against Saul's clone. - Assigning a cPS to prides is a no-go because we want to send both cPS up to demonic realm every time. - Necro and Engi seem like 2 very good candidates. Condi Ranger / Druid could probably also do it. - Necro wouldn't have to play the so-called meta build involving GS, even a Scepter / Dagger camping Necro would be very effective in this role. Epi can be used on cooldown because it's not integral to keeping prides under control. Scepter 2 and dagger 4 can by themselves lock down a pride pretty effectively. - Fear is the only tool that can actually let you move a pride further away from the center of the platform. Fear would be best used against prides when they are not movement-impaired.

Thanks, I've been working a lot with ffmpeg lately, so here's the gory slow-mo version:

So I was pugging Deimos last night because I was bored. First we got a normal mode kill then the group decided CM was doable. Ultimately we did not get the CM kill but here are some things that I found noteworthy: - On the start of the fight, the group sent 2 condi rangers up (plus whoever got green circled). Each condi ranger killed 1 pillar. Whoever the third person was, they either kept fixate off the dpsers or they helped the dpser with fixate. This made managing pillar health much more predictable, and pretty much guaranteed that Saul was freed after 2 green circles. This isn't a big deal on normal mode, but on CM, it freed up a lot more people to stay up top and kill the adds before reaching Saul, which is critical in CM. Pillars were marked up top and assigned. - Druids started the fight with full CA so that they could CA5 adds close to Saul / shackled prisoner and everybody could cleave them down. - The group used precog to negate mind crush, and distortion to prevent tears / adds from ripping off aegis prematurely. - Despite this, the group was on point grabbing tears because of the possibility of them screwing with precog. - The group used a Necro for add management during the fight. - Stuns are what turn Prides into Usain Bolt. - Prides can be feared. - DPS needs to be a lot higher in CM since you don't have Saul helping. - When Saul splits into 4 on the main platform, standing in the center of them is really deadly. We had wipes where many people were insta-downed because of this. - Flak kiting is significantly harder because you don't have Saul's banner helping you. Rev can still do it and be self-sufficient but it requires better planning and use of CDs. Because you are less survivable, you need to spread the flak out a bit more, which means you generally have to start a 2nd half-circle of flak after the first. I was laying this 2nd circle down inside the 1st circle but it makes more sense to lay the 1st circle down closer to center and the 2nd circle on the edge of the platform, so that when the hands are called to Deimos they don't run you over. - Warrior's Shattering blow is not a bad choice for CM but the timing is tight. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/133088397

This came up during the raid and it seemed like not everybody's game shows this. Look for the 'Deimos' text right before the orange spawns.

This is consistent with what I have seen / heard in various pug groups. From what I can tell, the 1 person going up and /gg = group does not have to fight final Saul below. From Nike's video, it looks like a modified version of that, where you don't actually /gg, you just wait for your compadres to burn and join you up top.

Here's the uncut version

This is the shelter where I adopted both of my cats:

Yeah thankfully, that was a much needed change

Many of the Samarog CM LFG's I see are looking for condi mes. Did we talk about this in voice during the raid? I forget. Condi mes with stability mantra I think.

That's a bad change IMO. Why would they do that? Part of the challenge of the fight. Here's some further recon on CM. This was a pug group I joined for lulz (yes I stayed up until 3AM), and they used the Continuum Split bug (as noted in today's patch notes) at the end of the fight.

The highlight for me was definitely when Maia, Temerity, and I showed complete lack of faith in the process.

After much practice we achieved the appropriately mediocre level of DPS: