Interrupts and Blocks on Bosses?

Kozai · April 2015

After multiple deaths over 2 hours against Wavecutter in the Blackheart dungeon and finally giving up, my group of friends and I are trying to figure out a few things about interrupting and blocking.

Does something like Shield Charge, which normally does an interrupt of a caster when it does a knockdown, still do an interrupt of a boss even though the boss is immune to knockdown? Ditto Stone Fist, from the Dragonknight Earthen Heart skill line? I'm the tank, but I'm not fast enough at interpreting graphics to pick up on the tells every time, so we are looking at ways for others to help interrupt.

Does anyone know if the Forking Bolts (purple bolts from Wavecutter, hit multiple people with very high damage, about every 10 seconds) count as Projectiles and can thus be blocked with Reflective Scales or Defensive Stance? They look sort of like projectiles, but hit everyone in the group, so may count as an AoE, hard to tell in this game.

Yakidafi · April 2015

Only way you can interrupt a boss is if you bash it when it is charging a "red" power attack. Nothing else work as if it would have been a normal monster.

ZOS_Seiffer · April 2015

First Mate Wavecutter's Forking Bolt ability can currently be blocked, dodged and reflected. Abilities like Defensive Stance and Reflective Scales are effective strategies against this ability.

Kozai wrote: »

Does something like Shield Charge, which normally does an interrupt of a caster when it does a knockdown, still do an interrupt of a boss even though the boss is immune to knockdown? Ditto Stone Fist, from the Dragonknight Earthen Heart skill line?

Yakidafi wrote: »

Only way you can interrupt a boss is if you bash it when it is charging a "red" power attack. Nothing else work as if it would have been a normal monster.

So there are a couple things to unpack here. You are correct about bosses being immune to crowd control effects. However, bosses that cast interruptible spells (spells that display the red "can be interrupted" effects) are susceptible to your interrupting abilities.

As Yakidafi mentioned, you can use your Bash interrupt (the default interrupt) to interrupt a boss. In addition, you can use abilities such as Crushing Shock and Venom Arrow to interrupt a boss. Abilities that do not interrupt a boss are spells like Shield Charge or Stone Fist. The difference between those two sets of spells is in the descriptive text. Spells that have an effect against an enemy "while the enemy is casting" will interrupt the cast. You won't trigger the crowd control effect, but you will successfully interrupt the spell.

Hopefully that helps you teach First Mate Wavecutter a lesson! Good luck!

Kozai · May 2015

Thank you very much for the reply, Seiffer, knowing what to look for in spell text to figure out what it will do for interruption is very helpful.

I'll go through skills with my friends to pick out the ones which can do that for next time, otherwise that boss was brutal, he was 1-shotting all but me (the tank), and 2-shotting me, and the Forking Bolt was firing so often it wouldn't be long before one or two of us would miss a block and die. Plus there are adds in that fight, and it is hard to stand anywhere where you can still face Wavecutter so you can see and block his attacks while hitting the adds. It takes our group minutes to drop dungeon bosses, so we have to counter dozens of attacks.

Next time that is a Daily Dungeon on one of our weekly gettogethers we'll see how Wavecutter fares.