Three Minutes with the Rage Goblin

Centaur Ruler and Rage Goblin

I have been working on improving my "boss 5" game.  ("Boss 5" is what my guild is calling the challenge II pair of bosses, Centaur Ruler and Rage Goblin.)  I have a guide to boss 5 that I made for my guild; I am gonna publish here eventually.  It's oriented towards the medium might player with no Skull Knight, which is what I am.  Stay tuned for that.

Lacking Skull Knight, as I do, means I lack the one tank in the game that can fairly easily stand up to the beating that the boss 5 pair put out.  My estimate for it is roughly 140000 HP/s, and I believe it can go higher, perhaps via critical hits.  That's so much damage that even with pretty massive debuffing, I cannot take it.  So I just use my PD as my tank.  This is helpful in that the extra energy from being hit helps him amp up.  But of course when the Goblin gets to him, he dies.

When I first played boss 5, I was excited when my guild finally managed to kill the Centaur Ruler.  I thought for sure I'd be able to go three minutes with the Rage Goblin.  But it turns out that he's actually by far the harder of the two bosses.  He dodges, and he dodges a lot.  Something like a half to two thirds of all blows (which includes procs), just flat out miss him.  Because of that, he's remarkably hard to debuff.  And because of that, I found myself using the same team and a similar strategy vs him as I was against both bosses.  The strategy was, basically, dump in heroes who are optimized for very short term damage production, hit Invincible, then when it ends, watch him kill the team.  Repeat every ~30 seconds.

I have been experimenting with debuffing, and found that I was getting pretty close to being able to sustain long run, sometimes getting up to 30 seconds after Invincible -- when I was lucky.  So I tried something new: I subbed out my Phantom King.  This still makes me nervous, because I fear the Goblin proccing, but it never seems to happen.  (My PD amp-up is quite fast, which helps.)  But I found that putting in three debuffers -- Shaman, Frost Witch, and Succubus -- I could usually debuff the Goblin so it was taking him several blows to kill my "tank", PD.

It is a bit surprising, but there really are not a lot of good debuffing heroes.  I don't have Moltanica, and so there was no more easy debuffing I could do.  (I suppose I might try Santa, but I suspect that the energy he provides from his multi-hitting proc would cause the Goblin to proc.)

So I just needed a little more debuffing... I tried speeding up my Shaman with Berserk 2 crests, but this probably made little or no difference.  I couldn't find anything else to do.  Debuffing was tapped out.

Finally I got the idea to try for more healing.  My first idea here was to sub out Succubus for Pixie.  However, it didn't work.  PD died pretty fast.  I think the problem is that Pixie just doesn't heal that much.  Partly the problem is my Pixie is still only level 160, no evo.  She's fairly high on priority list for experience, but she just hasn't made it to #1 yet.  OK, that didn't work.

My tank is my PD, with talent Revite 3, and berserk 4 crests.  (This is needed against the boss 5 pair for fast amp-up for PD stacks.)  But you don't need to amp up fast if you can stay in the fight for long enough.  So, I decided to try swapping out my PD's berserk crests for lifedrain 4 crests.

Pumpkin Duke: ready for Rage Goblin?

My PD has about 160000 hitpoints wearing them; once he amps up to full speed, he's hitting 5x per second, thus the crests would get him 32000 HP/s.  Would this be enough to go the full three minutes with Rage Goblin?

Not really.  Damn, that Goblin is nasty.  However, now I often do get a long run of a minute or more.  A lot of the time PD's hitpoints are pegged to maximum.  But sometimes... not.  My deduction as to what is happening is that the debuffers miss several procs in a row, enough that the Goblin is actually doing substantial damage.  Then he gets in a critical hit or two, and that's that.

Still, I got lucky the other day and got a full three minutes.   Here's my team almost at the end:

After 159 seconds, still going

Nice damage.

82 million damage vs Rage Goblin

Can this concept be extended to work against both bosses?  I doubt it.  The problem is debuffing, again.  You need at least one debuffer to suppress the Centaur Ruler.  That leaves two vs the Goblin, and two are just not enough.  I need a better tank.

[update: improved my strategy somewhat.]