vMA Last Boss Strategy Q

Croblasta · July 2017

First of all, I'm not asking for a nerf and I definitely need to keep practicing, git gud and L2P. But I had a question since I keep running out of resources.

Current Setup
Necros, Llambris and 3 piece IA

Front Bar
Blockade, FP, Scamp, Harness Magicka, and Inner light
Back Bar
LL, Surge, Scamp, Healing ward and Inner light.

Tri Stat food and Pots

Current Issues
CG: Hard to kill a in stage one without ult. I'm practicing the "helicopter" but it's less than 50/50 that I beat move on without an ult.

Resources:
Running out/low of resources when I I'm done with the crystals and down for stage 2.

Possible solutions:
Keep practicing CGs, but suggestions welcome.

Considering overloading during stage 2 to increase resources.
Considering swapping out llambris monster set for a sustain monster set.
Considering going 2 5 pieces. Maybe Necro and Spinngers
Replacing Surge with Ele Drain

Stages 1-8 I felt like I was making progress the more I practiced but stage 9 seems to be 1 step forward 2 steps back.

Let me know your thoughts and appreciate the feedback!!

DeadlyRecluse · July 2017

If you need to use ult to kill the crematorial guard, try to hit the boss with your ult, too. This is pretty doable with several ults. Then the ult drop on the crematorial isn't "wasted."

For resources, if you are going for your first clear, grab all sigils after crystal phase. Defensive sigil bounces the machine gun skulls back (giving you larger margin for error/even the ability to sneak in a heavy attack), haste sigil gives you resources+speed to get all gold ghosts.

Scyantific · July 2017

I'm going to assume you're using a shock staff? Tried doing heavies to regen resources? You have shields so you should be fine replacing your Health + Magicka food for Witchmother's.

DRXHarbinger · July 2017

You can just overload the 1st phase outright Inc guard and start crystal phase with full resources. Just a thought.

Use witchmother food not tri stat crap.

Where is your daedric prey? It's a must for the little scamp.

Balsagna · July 2017

I would go with potent witchmother's brew and essence of spell power pots. I also suggest using the speed glyph right before you go to crystal phase that way you can maneuver around really quickly, and you don't ever have to use stamina for anything other than dodge rolling the boss. Using a defense glyph in stage 1 is also a nice way to add dps to the boss in stage 1, he will damage himself after his first port/add spawn and you won't have to worry about interrupt. After you kill the add spawn, you can run right to the boss and drop the destro ult and DPS the boss and the guard that is either spawning or is about to spawn. Just remember to BLOCK after you drop your ult so you don't get knocked down giving the ceremonial guard free dps.

When you get to stage 3 the ghosts are your pathway to victory. They always go after the boss so be near the boss and make sure to grab them. You should get your three gold ghosts at about the same time as the ceremonial guard spawn in stage 3. You can then destro ult the boss and the guard while stunned and dps the boss/burn him dead.

Best of luck, if you got to the boss stage you can beat it. Take heart in that.

bebynnag · July 2017

because you are using the scamp use hardened ward instead of harness magic, it will shield you both

i prefer double destro (lightning) i understand why you would go resto if you want to keep it i suggest swiching healing ward to mutagen because it heals you & the pet

but tbh you should really slot daedric pray instead, your scamps damage will go through the roof

NEVER loose surge in vMA - it gives you & your pet major sorcery & heals you & your pet

blue max health & mag food

heavy attacks on a lighting staff are key for resource management & aoe damage

i only use force pulse as an interupt which has many many uses in Vma. but for the last round of the last stage you may want to consider swapping it out for mages fury (class execute)

you could try Infernal guardian as your monster set - this way when you shield up every 6 sec there is a very good chance you are also dealing damage

i prefer meteor front bar (for extra magic) and destro ult bk bar but the argument for using overload is a good one - t the end of the day it's personal prefrence

Yakidafi · July 2017

Why dont you use hardened ward instead of healing ward and harness magicka? it cost less and you only need to cast 1 shield. You get the healing from power surge and throw down the elemental blockade and you might want to get the destructive clench, or go with twilight.

I usually throw down destro ult on boss and cg, ult will be full after the up stage anyway.

SoLooney · July 2017

drop ult on boss and crem guard for stage 1
overload the crystals stage 2
you should have plenty of magicka, grab defense sigil and speed sigil for stage 3

MakeMeUhSamich · July 2017

SoLooney wrote: »

drop ult on boss and crem guard for stage 1
overload the crystals stage 2
you should have plenty of magicka, grab defense sigil and speed sigil for stage 3

If you use your ult to get upstairs how do you use overload on crystals?

Taleof2Cities · July 2017

As everyone else said Hardened Ward isn't on your bars.

I also use the destro ult on boss and crematorial guards ... just an option here since overload can be quite good too.

NotNormanBates · July 2017

1st off definitely recommend swapping harness for hardened ward. shields you, your pet, and can take more damage than harness.

2nd recommendation swap back bar for lightning staff and duel slot hardened ward

3rd. consider running endless fury/mages wrath and daedric prey.

rotation LL-->Blockade-->Pet pulse-->prey--> heavy x 2. not the absolute best damage but will keep your resources like nothing else.

4th. if your trying to do the initial phase w/o using an ultimate, this is what i do. stage starts, i drop LL and WoE in the center, the boss appears, pet pulse-->daedric prey-->heavy x 1--> dodge roll--> heavy until he teleport's. After he teleport's he's going to do his channeled attack.instead of bashing him immediately drop your LL,WoE,Pet pulse, Then bash, daedric prey, then heavy attack while moving around the 2 of them. make sure to keep an eye on the boss's skull throw, as getting knocked back with guard on you is probably death.

5th. make sure that there are no healers alive before going up. healer dont get killed by the blast knocking you from upstairs, when finishing crystal phase. crem. guards DO die tho.

6th. Use tri-stat food (magicka, stamina, and health) and tri-pots (magicka, stamina, and health). If this knocks you under 18-19k health, grab an extra health glyph (i wear 2 at all times, the extra health is much more useful then the extra magicka). drink the tri-polts as soon as they become available, aslong as your not at max magicka (unless of course you need stamina or health badly. the potion's give you a 20 or 30% extra regen to all stat's(can't remember which).

Lastly, just take it easy. For me the biggest problem i had beating that stage the 1st time, and again when going for my flawless, was getting anxious towards the end of the fight. Just check yourself, be cool, follow mechanics, keep an eye on your stats, keep an eye on on they edges of the arena for gold ghost's, make sure power surge is up, overload the first summoner lady, do some damage. once you have 3 gold ghosts drop your destro ulti on the guard and boss, drop AoE's/DoT's and heavy attack boss, repeat. (you might be able to get away w/ just burning the boss after the 1st set of gold ghost's) just remember to keep your cool.

laksikus · July 2017

i would do one of 3 strategies.

1. cast dots before boss spawns, then destro ult the second boss is vulnerable, and then force pulse spam, kill healer go up
2. Spam overload till boss goes up, kill healer, go up
3. IF your dps isnt high enough to do it before CG spawns, kill healer streight away, anduse your destro ult on boss and CG together, should nuke boss to 70 and kill CG, then go up
4. IF your ulti isnt up dmg boss till CG spawn, then just heavy attack and ward, let your pet do the job^^

In any case, there should not be a second CG spawning.
Try NOT to fall down. Use upstairs to charge ultimate and restore magicka with heavy attacks.

seedubsrun · July 2017

I think a good amount of the issue is some skills should be moved around and you should work towards more damage output. Also, what CP rank are you at? Your CP allocation can be really important.

I would drop the resto staff and go double lightning. Looks like with your setup you're using crafted or random set staves. You'll want both staves to be sharpened. Enchant your back bar with a lightning glyph and front with a weapon/spell damage enchant. If you don't have it yet, you'll want to get 75 champion points into Thaumaturge for bonus off balance damage. You'll get off balance from your wall of elements and liquid lighning.

Then try setting up your bars like this:

Front bar:
Inner light
Endless Fury
Familiar
Elemental Blockade
Hardened Ward
Shooting Star

Back bar:
Power Surge
Deadric Prey
Familiar
Boundless Storm
Liquid Lightning
Destro Ultimate

I suggested Boundless Storm as a flex spot. I like it cause it does AOE damage (increased by your destruction staff passive), can proc the disintegration passive for sorcs, increases your movement speed for 6 seconds, and mitigates a fair amount of damage. The movement speed aspect is especially helpful during the crystal phase when trying to reach the rotating wall. It's also helpful in the last phase if the boss spawns on the opposite side of the map from where you are. If you use all your stamina running there, you wont be able to interupt and will die.

I recommend Endless fury as it's very good for finishing mobs and bosses quickly and any kills with it give you resources. Very helpful in vMA

With this setup you'll want to start the fight on your backbar. apply Power Surge then Drop liquid lightning, blockade, and pulse your familiar right before the boss spawns and hit em with deadric prey when they do spawn. Then just heavy attack a couple times. This will kick off trying to get the boss to 70% health pretty nicely.

When the boss teleports, interupt to stop the attack that kills you, reapply your dots (liquid, blockade, pet, deadric prey) then drop your destro ultimate and just heavy attack. If you do it right the CG will spawn as the utimate starts applying damage. move in a circle around it doing heavy attacks till it's dead. The aoe effect from your staff will also damage the boss and the healer. This should allow you to kill the CG and send the boss up top for the crystal phase.

Then move to the portal, kill the clanfear, and grab the movement speed boon if you can before heading up top.

Apply your dots to a crystal and use plenty of heavy attacks to sustain resources. You'll want to keep your power surge up 100% of the time and keep an eye on your ward. With the bar setup I recommended you should do enough damage to pretty quickly take out the crystals. if you feel like you're getting overwhelmed you can drop back downstairs for a sec to gather yourself before going back up. This will restart the soul churn effect that's on you while up there. If at all possible try to have a potion ready to use when you've destroyed the crystals and get knocked back down.

Pop the potion and activate Boundless. This will get you to the boss while using minimal stamina resources. Interrupt, Reapply all your attacks to the boss, dodge or block the skull attack. The gold ghosts are your main priority. If you can get the boss down to 30% or so by the time you get the third golden ghost, you're pretty much going to win. You don't really need to worry about any enemies other than the boss. Keep your attacks applied and gather ghosts until you can use them and do so right away. When the boss is stunned drop your ulltimate and reapply your dots. Start using your execute (endless fury) at around 22%. You should be able to take the boss out right around the time the stun effect wears off.

Continue using your tri-pot potions here but switch to max health+max magicka food. Try enchanting your rings with magicka recovery glyphs and a damage on the necklace. As you get more comfortable with using heavy attacks to get back resources, put a damage glyph back on one of the rings.

Electrone_Magnus · July 2017

well if you're running out of resources then your probably spamming shields too often and using your spammable too often. you need to only burst down the crematorial guard and occasionally force shock the boss when he casts necrotic swarm. to deal with the daedroth i usually circle around and cast haunting curse and crushing shock while boundless storm is active so i get a speed boost. Once the boss goes up you should only use dots on the crystals and heavy attack. More importantly you should never dodge roll the skull attacks as you will eventually run out of stam and die. So its best to shield yourself and then block it.

If the crystals are too hard to destroy then jump down and restart the portal. But you need to kill the daedroth once again. if it gets too hard then you should use your destro ultimate on it.

Croblasta · July 2017

Electrone_Magnus wrote: »

well if you're running out of resources then your probably spamming shields too often and using your spammable too often. you need to only burst down the crematorial guard and occasionally force shock the boss when he casts necrotic swarm. to deal with the daedroth i usually circle around and cast haunting curse and crushing shock while boundless storm is active so i get a speed boost. Once the boss goes up you should only use dots on the crystals and heavy attack. More importantly you should never dodge roll the skull attacks as you will eventually run out of stam and die. So its best to shield yourself and then block it.

If the crystals are too hard to destroy then jump down and restart the portal. But you need to kill the daedroth once again. if it gets too hard then you should use your destro ultimate on it.

Thanks everyone. I'm currently running two shields because I run into some "oh crap" moments and I shield, bs, shield and sometimes spam. . I would really like to run one shield to free up a skill but when I tried it in the earlier stages I died.

I tried to put shield and power surge on the same button, so I could shield, bs, and surge. Will let you know on CP as well when I get home.

seedubsrun · July 2017

Croblasta wrote: »

Electrone_Magnus wrote: »

well if you're running out of resources then your probably spamming shields too often and using your spammable too often. you need to only burst down the crematorial guard and occasionally force shock the boss when he casts necrotic swarm. to deal with the daedroth i usually circle around and cast haunting curse and crushing shock while boundless storm is active so i get a speed boost. Once the boss goes up you should only use dots on the crystals and heavy attack. More importantly you should never dodge roll the skull attacks as you will eventually run out of stam and die. So its best to shield yourself and then block it.

If the crystals are too hard to destroy then jump down and restart the portal. But you need to kill the daedroth once again. if it gets too hard then you should use your destro ultimate on it.

Thanks everyone. I'm currently running two shields because I run into some "oh crap" moments and I shield, bs, shield and sometimes spam. . I would really like to run one shield to free up a skill but when I tried it in the earlier stages I died.

I tried to put shield and power surge on the same button, so I could shield, bs, and surge. Will let you know on CP as well when I get home.

I like to put Surge on my backbar so every 2 or 3 rotations I can activate it before I start dropping AOEs then ward on front bar for those Oh Sh** moments. For me at least it frees up just the right amount of space on my bars for more damage abilities. You wont need to worry so much about warding if you have a higher DPS output cause enemies will die before they can hurt you.

For a sorc, Hardened Ward is the way to go above any other as the shield size is much bigger and it also shields your pets. Another reason to just go one shield too is that they are expensive and if you find yourself spamming shields as is then spamming 2 shields is likely why you run out of resources so often.

It took me a little bit of time to trust that Power Surge would keep me alive enough to not need to spam shields. Try focusing on that concept as you'll save a ton of resources by knowing when you don't need a shield up and you'll increase your DPS by using attacks more instead of activating your shield.

Also, what are your armor traits and what Mundus are you using?

RizzlyBear · July 2017

My suggestion is to sell to vendor Ilambris

DjMuscleboy02 · July 2017

The biggest thing that helped me in vma was being told to stop playing defensively and kill things before they can kill me. I dropped any thoughts of a resto and cruised through with double destro and haven't looked back.

NotNormanBates · July 2017

Why would you sell illambris?

inf.toniceb17_ESO · July 2017

I find harness magicka works a lot better than hardened ward on that stage. Put some points into bastion to buff it a bit. As for tactics, i pop destro ult at the begining on both daedroth and the boss. After crystal stage i grab healing and speed buffs, collect ghosts, damaging the boss whan possible, pop another ult on when daedroth has spawned, then grab last two sigils use sinergy and finish the job.

Croblasta · July 2017

So I made some of the suggested changes

Front Bar:
LL, Blockade, Scamp, Hardened Ward, Inner Light

Back Bar:
Force Pulse, Prey, Scamp, Surge, Inner light

The idea being keep my DoTs on front Bar with shield so I'm not constantly bar swapping.
I added a health enchant and will be using with mother.

The hardest part for me last night was tland keeping and consostently reapplying surge.

I forgot to look at CP distribution, but I'm 540 CP and I have 75 in therm, and then spread between elfborn and the increase elemental damage.

72 I think in bastion for 23% shield increase and the rest of Red spread through the damage reduction.

Green Tree I have the mag recovery and reduce dodge roll.

I probably won't have a chance to really play until the weekend, but any thought appreciated.

seedubsrun · July 2017

Croblasta wrote: »

So I made some of the suggested changes

Front Bar:
LL, Blockade, Scamp, Hardened Ward, Inner Light

Back Bar:
Force Pulse, Prey, Scamp, Surge, Inner light

The idea being keep my DoTs on front Bar with shield so I'm not constantly bar swapping.
I added a health enchant and will be using with mother.

The hardest part for me last night was tland keeping and consostently reapplying surge.

I forgot to look at CP distribution, but I'm 540 CP and I have 75 in therm, and then spread between elfborn and the increase elemental damage.

72 I think in bastion for 23% shield increase and the rest of Red spread through the damage reduction.

Green Tree I have the mag recovery and reduce dodge roll.

I probably won't have a chance to really play until the weekend, but any thought appreciated.

I think those adjustments will work nicely for you. If you end up getting a Maelstrom staff you want to use you may want at least blockade on your back bar. Reasoning is this:

Let's say you're running dual lightning staves now and you get a lightning Maelstrom staff. You'd obviously put it on the bar you have Elemental Blockade on. When you cast blockade and then bar swap the Maelstrom enchant swaps bars too. So you would want a sharpened staff with a spell damage enchant on your other bar to maximize the damage of your build.

You'll likely get used to keeping up surge as you play the build more but an option to try is to really hone a rotation that you stick with during heavy mobs and bosses. Take your longest lasting damage skill (Liquid Lightning) as your base for establishing a rotation. Then activate skills in order of descending duration. In your case it would be in order Liquid Lightning, Elemental Blockade, Pet pulse, Deadric Prey. Then you would heavy attack to fill in the gaps and increase resource sustain.

If you can tighten your rotation to where you're starting it again right as the first liquid lightning is wearing out then that means you have roughly a 10 second rotation. Since Power Surge lasts 33 seconds you can cast it, do your rotation 3 times, then cast it again and start over. Now all that is a perfect situation and since you have to move a lot in Maelstrom it's a bit harder to do. The point though is that if you can time your rotations to just include power surge then you don't have to keep an eye on the duration or even think about it at all.

it might benefit you more to drop force pulse now that it's on your back bar. It's expensive for a spammable and not really needed if you're heavy attacking more often. I'd recommend Endless Fury. It'll really make the last 20% of boss fights much faster and allows you to kill adds really easily too. If an add gets caught in your AoE attacks you can hit em with your heavy attack and then cast Fury and lots of times you'll kill em outright.

If you find that keeping your shields up constantly is hard then I'd move some points from bastion into something else. That'll help you survive during down time.

If you are doing more heavy attacks with this build I'd put some points into tenacity as well to get back more magicka. I do 75 into tenacity and arcanist and then split up the rest between break free, block, and dodge roll. Just an example though.

GrigorijMalahevich · July 2017

Use skills, kill stuff, don't die

Works 9/10 times