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Ascending Tide Dungeons - Shipwright's Regret and Coral Aerie - Hard Mode Guide
Introduction
The two Ascending Tide dungeons—Shipwright's Regret and Coral Aerie—have arguably the most difficult dungeon Hard Modes to date. In contrast to my previous guides, this guide is less about technical details for the mechanics and more about offering players tips on how to best deal with the mechanics.
Shipwright's Regret – Foreman Bradiggan
Avoiding Paralyzing Fear
- For players at melee range (inside the initial circular telegraph): It's recommended that you roll dodge the mechanic. Dodge either inwards or sideways, right before the expanding circle completely fills up. Do not dodge outwards, or you will likely catch one of the fear circles as it leaves.
- For players at medium range (just outside the initial circular telegraph): It's recommended that you roll dodge the mechanic. Dodge forward towards the boss right as the fear AoEs travel outward.
- For players at long range: You have enough time that you can either side-step the AoEs or dodge them.
Harrowing Haunters (and Haunting Charge)
- These ghosts always spawn after a Haunting Charge, and there will be a ghost that spawns for every player who does not currently have a tethered ghost.
- The boss will always do Haunting Charge in the direction that he is facing, so the tank will often have control over the direction of the charge, though there can be times where the boss will turn for a mechanic (e.g., casting a Soul Bomb) and then immediately charge without first turning back to face the tank.
- These ghosts increase the damage taken by players, reduces healing, and reduces players' damage output, on top of doing damage directly to the tethered players.
- Tanks need to be very careful while tethered; an unblocked light attack from the boss while tethered can hit for well over 30K, and heavy attacks while tethered are exceptionally painful as well.
- Since the ghosts cannot be taunted or pulled, the way to stack the ghosts together is for the players to stack together.
- The boss will always do 2x Haunting Charges in the first phase, 1x in the second phase, and charges happen on a timer in the third (execute) phase.
- Don't kill the ghosts that spawn from the first charge in the first phase: This will ensure that no new ghosts spawn from the second charge. Kill the ghosts after the second charge.
- Kill the ghosts immediately after they spawn in the second phase.
- Don't bother with killing ghosts in the third (execute) phase, since the constant charges mean that they will continually respawn.
Flame Shapers
- They cannot be taunted, but they can be chained.
Ground Plague
- This is the expanding circle that the Colossus's Rancid Hammer leaves behind.
- Keeping the Colossus turned away from the group when it casts Rancid Hammer will leave the Plague in a somewhat more favorable position.
- The plague does not expand indefinitely: When the Colossus casts Rancid Hammer a second time, the existing Plague will dissipate and is replaced by a new Plague at the location of the Rancid Hammer.
- The strategy that we adopted was to keep the Colossus near the edge of the plague and slowly inching away as necessary to accommodate the growing Plague.
Soul Bomb
- This is a damage share mechanic, similar to Roaring Flare in Cloudrest and Bug Bomb in Blackrose Prison
- However, unlike previous damage share mechanics, only two players should stack together for a bomb. Any other number of players in a bomb AoE will be lethal.
Shipwright's Regret – Nazaray
Kindred Spirit
- Two spectral wolves opposite each other must be killed, and the resulting safe areas are the spots where the wolves stood. Entrance and exit wolves are generally the ones most groups target.
Liquidate
- The small blue circles dropped by the boss will empower the boss and make it immune to damage and increase the damage done by the boss.
- Empowered damage is very high: an empowered melee light attack can hit the tank for well over 30K if unblocked, and an empowered ranged light attack can hit for well over 40K if unblocked. Extra block mitigation (e.g., Bracing Anchor) is required to survive an empowered heavy attack if the tank opts to block rather than dodge it.
Lurchers
- Terrorizing Timber / Agonizing Bramble: This is the Lurchers' "shake" mechanic, which will afflict every player with an unavoidable and unpurgeable health-scaled DoT. Healers are advised to keep HoTs on people, esp. when the group is split for Kindred Spirit.
- Up to three lurchers can spawn, and their spawns are tied to boss health percentages.
- Only one lurcher can be up at any time. (This is a nerf from the original mechanic on PTS.)
- Killing lurchers is thus optional. For groups with high damage output, killing lurchers will just mean that the next lurcher will spawn almost immediately after the current lurcher dies, which is effectively no different than just ignoring the lurchers outright. (But for groups learning this boss, focusing the lurchers down can help reduce pressure, particularly on the tank.)
Shipwright's Regret – Captain Numirril
Drowned Corpses
- There can be a maximum of 8 corpses active at any given time (2 per side).
- Corpses will slowly but continually spawn in pairs as long as there are "openings" on two adjacent sides.
- For example: If there are 2 corpses each on north and south and 1 corpse each on east and west, there will be no spawn, but if there are 2 corpses each on north and east and 1 corpse each on south and west, then a pair of corpses will spawn to fill the gaps on south and west.
- The very first ability that each corpse casts when it spawns is Wave. Corpse spawns are the source of the waves. And this is why waves always appear in pairs, originating from adjacent sides of the arena.
- Hurl is the corpses' ranged light attack, and it targets players at random and does not respect taunt. Each hit of Hurl will spawn a Bile Pool at the target's location.
- Retch is the corpses' interruptible channel that spawns Bile Pools near the corpse.
- It is NOT necessary to interrupt Retch. In fact, when the dungeon first appeared on PTS, the ability was not interruptible at all on Hard Mode.
- A corpse that is busy retching will not be hurling. So players have a choice: They can either interrupt Retch slightly slow the buildup of Bile Pools (keep in mind that Hurl will spawn pools as well, albeit not quite a quickly as Retch), or they can ignore the Retch and stop that corpse from casting Hurl for a period of time. And there can be scenarios where interrupting can even wipe the group.
- For example: Let's say your group has had a couple of deaths and you're trying to recover. Because of the deaths, you've fallen behind on corpse management, and there are now five corpses around the room. In such a scenario, you should not interrupt as you try to recover. Let them channel: the Bile Pools are fairly easy to clean up, but having multiple corpses all throwing their Hurl at the surviving members of your group will almost certainly cut your recovery efforts short.
- To put it another way, when you interrupt, you stop the buildup of pools in front of the corpse, but in exchange, you get high-damage projectiles pelting players at random and pool spawns at player locations all around the room. On top of the time and effort to perform the interrupt itself. Needless to say, this is usually not a good trade.
- General advice: Keep the corpse population in check. And don't bother with interrupts: this is one of the extremely rare encounters in ESO where interrupting usually hurts more than it helps, and I would even go as far as to say that any guide recommending interrupts is offering faulty advice.
Drowned Hulks
- Two hulks will spawn at 40% boss health. At this point, the boss has 5.9M health and is subject to execute-style bonuses such as Bloodthirsty, whereas the two hulks combined have 8.2M health (4.1M health each). Groups may find it easier to simply focus on the boss and ignore the hulks at this point.
Positioning
- Because the waves are caused by corpse spawns and the corpses always spawn in the middle area of each side of the room, the middle of the room is a dangerous location to hold enemies, as there will often be waves criss-crossing that area. Plus, the boss often charges to the edges anyway.
Shipwright's Regret – Video
https://youtu.be/y-a6bUAJKGs
Edited by ZOS_Kevin on November 7, 2024 11:05AM
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