how do you solo hard mobs?

[Ebag333]

Excellent post. Should be stickied.

[Sparzyscrat]

The best tactic i found for soloing mobs is to put your heal on your attack pet then target mob u want, put pets on wait and go to another room or get out of sight behind something then click attack.

As long as u are out of sight of mobs they wont agro back to u, just remember though if attack dies make sure u either put wait or kill off other pets or they will come back to u with the mobs in tow.

This works in LE too just dont wait in front of a door even when its closed the mobs can somehow still see you, wait to 1 side of the door instead.

Happy hunting

[notalive]

Aye, when the attack pet is about to die you can also root the mob with Teoretical Research-root(third perk), which lasts for 1 min. Then you can respawn your pet.

I've hit 212 now and I managed to get myself Zhok. And he's hawt.

Uhm, I guess I am the same gimp as I allways have been ,but with some effort I actually managed ot kill a 220 penumbra heckler of elemets. I also can take down some of the inferno mobs(maybe spirit, I need some skills in pulling mobs)

Also during that penumbra heckler, I noticed that my heal delta helps ALOT while recovering after 3 hits, if im really unlucky and get hit for like, 6k damage(heal pet will heal about 1,2k right away) I would need alot of time to recover this with just my pet. I tried to sit down and I realised I got about 166 health about twice a second or so, which helps alot, so with my pet, soothing spirit and my heal delta I can recover pretty quickly. The heckler seem to lose the agg on me when I stop shooting and sit down.(?)


Besides that I've been looking a tiny bit on the LE procs ... and they confuse me alot. I ahve problems deciding which ones to use, and when to use them.

Anticipated Evasion
Sow Doubt
Diffuse Rage
Economic Nanobot Use
Ego Strike

Now, I am not sure which ones you guys use most, but I've been using Anticipated Evasion a tiny bit, not actually felt it helps.

During a few inferno missions I tried to use Sow Doubt and Diffuse Rage, without noticing anything.

Can someone tell me a bit more about the procs and how/when to use them?

[Helamorious]

Proc's basically run in your NCU continuously, and when you attack something, theres a 5% chance it will activate.

Anticipated Evasion
Sow doubt
Diffuse Rage
Economic Nanobot Use
Ego Strike

Personally when soloing I run regain focus (type 1) and anticipated evasion (type 2). When both of these have fired, thats an additional 350 evades for 1 minute, pushing me somewhere over 2150 self-buffed, along with about 1050 AAD when sacrificial shielding is running.

My general tips for soloing:

1) Know the area. Take not of things like where adds are, where you can leave your pets while your pulling, and fight the Dyna without being trained.

2) Debuffs. Always keep damage debuffs and NSD running, and always keep refreshing it... you never know what might happen within the duration of these nanos, and you get trained while fighting, you want the longest possible time to debuff these adds before you have to worry about the Dyna nuking again.

3) Buffs. Always buff up completely before starting, including reflect graft.

4) Sacrificial Shielding is always good for pulling, and if you know the mob well enough, you can use it during the fight for extra damage. In doing this you'll get your extra defense, but things may get a little complicated if your caught in nano cool down.

5) Rihwen, to me, is little more than a Dot. He cannot tank, and i never expect him to. Although, flicking agro between your self and the pet is the best possible situation. If your Rihwen looks like he might die, you have a few options. Tell him to "wait" hopefully this will draw more agro away from him and his higher heal-delta will kick in. Stick the heal pet on him, make sure that you have stims available (better yet, the stims from the sl archaic dungeons), SS, and depending how tough the mob, your absorb shields. The last, and in my opinion the worst, possibility is using quark containment field, and running away to summon a new pet.

As an MP don't expect to be able to solo mobs easily or quickly, but from my experience we can solo better than a lot of other classes, and its far more enjoyable too! Its wonderful when a doc appears to kill Crete or Spetses to find it almost dead...to an mp...

[notalive]

Thanks for your reply and thanks for those links to aomainframe ... I have only looked at the procs at auno, and never found the stats there :S

Anyway, I managed to get myself a reflect graft today, and im so looking forward to test it out. so ... work = boring. At least now that I can solo inf dynas(spirits but anyway...)

I was speaking with a dudette in my org, which says dots are the best way of pulling mobs.

Can anyone give me an idea how to pull mobs in inferno when I dont have sacrifical shielding?

Most of you have probably seen how close the spirits stands, and they ahve a long hit range and when one of the mobs kinda agros me and I start walking backwards to pull ,I tend to get hit once, which aggros te rest of the spirits around. I did manage to kill one inf dyna spirit while there was five other spirits chasing me(believe it or not :P my pet died after the dyna died though, so it was a close call)

But like, how do I pull the dyna away from the regular spirit mobs?

My general tips for soloing:

1) Know the area. Take not of things like where adds are, where you can leave your pets while your pulling, and fight the Dyna without being trained.

Sometimes the mob I want to kill is around there, which this one is, and when/if I or someone elsle needs the loot we cant just skip it becuase of adds. :P

[Helamorious]

If you dont have your SS yet, id recommend getting into IS and picking up yourself a Ring of Weeping Flesh.

By spirits in inferno, i assume your talking about Conflagrent etc, near the yutto marshes statue exits. Ive never really tried much for dot-pulling these... i used to pull add's, kill them, then pull boss... now, thats a very heavily traffic zone, so you want to avoid pulling towards the path and statues... just play around a bit, figure out where you can pull them and how far you need to pull them... it might take a few attempts, but you should be able to work it out.

When your dot-pulling, dont attack...dot the mob and try and get out of sight of the add's so they give up, while the boss continues to gain ag on you via the dot.

If you do get an add, the mezz pet can usually handle it for the most part...but, you can always hit the add with quark containment field, and move away... you might have to tell your pets to follow to bring the dyna with you though.

[notalive]

Ahh! Now I see how pulling with dots works! Cool.

I will have to test it out when I get online again on my main computer.

Using QCF(quark containment field) to root one single add works great too, however, I prefere using QCF on the dyna if I know I can land it, that way I can kill the add first just to be sure that add wont bother me when QCF runs out, killing inf dynas takes a bit more than one min. :P

But when I execute the dot on the dyna, wont that aggro the mobs standing around the dyna? Uhm, and as I see it, the mobs in inferno tends to lose agg quickly if i just run away. Wont the adds continue following me like the dyna?

I havent tried too many mobs besides the one close to Yuttos Marshes, and from what I have experienced this far, I have like, two endings: me dead or dyna dead.

Uhm, to explain that a bit better, I pull 1 dyna and 10 adds which kills me in no-time or 1 dyna which I kill.(except if I am in one of those badass-evil-mean-agressive-killing-machine mode and kill the dyna and the adds)

[Dancingrage]

THe idea behind a dot pull is that you're damaging the boss but not the adds, so the adds will eventually lose aggro while the boss will not and will continue to chase you since you're damaging it via the dot (IS dot ring or ToTW dot ring if you somehow have it works)

[Helamorious]

Yeah, thats right...

If you agro something by moving into its comfort zone, instead of hurting it, it will loose agro relatively quickly once your out of line-of-sight... just make sure that you run far enough that the adds do indeed loose agro.

[Dancingrage]

How I soloed harder stuff:

I generally got into the habit of being 1) an evasion nut, my setup was basically, "if it doesn't bump up my evades, it's worthless." in regards to armor and the like. If it COULD bump up evades and it didn't, there was a problem.

Since I was using bow, that's hard to make up, since the Right Arm implant usually doesn't come with it's own AAD cluster (and those are probably more rare than the Spiritech Mesh for droprate), but without the bow takes a serious hit.

Balancing that out I play in a conservative manner: I"m always running the 2 evasion procs regardless of what I"m taking on or where. Since I"m soloing, I only get Anticipation of Retaliation, and trust me when I say I use it at all times. The LE procs aren't a sure-fire thing, but it is nice to have both running and AoR as well...410 evades are nothing to sneeze at.

For armor, since I was never rich, I'd use my own little hodge-podge of bits of armor that added up to a very nice evasion setup, using Mystical Force gear mixed with Apoc or whatnot (I like doing stuff on a dime.) Sure, it's not your CSS, but when you can't afford CSS, you just have to get creative on how you make up those evades. If you can get a suit of whatever evasion bits you can get on, all the better.

I always use a body pull, and if I pull too many it's time to root and bail out. Pets are waiting a ways back, even the healpet.

I sic my whiner and mezzball on the pet after I've pulled to a comfortable range away from the mobs. I usually pull to a designated area where I have plenty of room to run around in and not get snarled on various things...means some times I may be pulling for a long ways, but better that than adds or other unpleasantness.

During the fight I"m constantly juggling aggro around, if the Rihwen's taking too much of a beating I pull him off and open up with more damage on my end, nukes, perks, etc, and if I'm taking too much of a beating I stop attacking and run around out of range a bit until the fighting pet gets aggro again.

I'm ALWAYS using the SL debuffs as well as Wrath Abatement, and that keeps the overall damage down for both me and the pet.

If I NEED to get aggro, I throw out a CoC, since that has almost a Mongo's worth of taunt to it, best time to throw it up is when all your evade procs are running, of course.

If I NEED to lose aggro, stop fighting and use Channel Rage on the fighting pet, at high levels it's a nice increase to damage and might get the aggro off fast.

I'm always full def soloing, even though with a Tigress that means I can forget about 1/1...I'm close enough to it that I can get my ice nukes off in between comfortably though, so damage doesn't take that much of a hit when I'm on the damage end of things.

Two things that are very important in solo play are these:

Understand your toolset. You can perk every perkline under the sun but it won't do you any good if you don't understand it and use it. Starfall's Dazzle With Lights is a really neat way to stop a mob for the 15 seconds it's running and is the only way you can get the rest of the perk chain to start (if it lands, that is). One thing that a lot of newer players have problems with, (and I did too, trust me,) is "How the heck do I fit all this crap I gotta run on one hotbar?!?!?!" Simple, you dont. I've got one hotbar for debuffs and pet macro commands, second line on that is perk actions, 3rd is buffing, etc. This makes sure I can use almost all of my perk actions quickly without losing track of what other stuff needs to be done, and is incredibly useful. MP Toolsets are now fairly well balanced, and used right can keep up with a lot of other profs out there now in terms of soloing. If there's something you don't understand about the toolset you have access to, hit the big, almighty, ultimate MP guide listed in the rooted thread section and read up, and ask questions here.

Understand your target. Mobs you're going after may have, of all the things, special attacks, (yes, I've been hit with a burst before...in SL of all the places.) or if you're going after the Merlin Dragons, you may find out that their little AOE nuke toy can't be NSD'd (is one of the few nukes in all the game that can't), or the target you're going after can hit you from the other side of the zone....or it debuffs YOU down just enough to be annoying because now you can't cast your top debuff anymore. Knowing what your target is capable of is very important to helping you solo, since it's basically knowing that at any second, that dragon could drop a 1.5k nuke on you and you need to make sure you can survive that, or the damage range of that vortexoid is gonna be really wild, so keeping it under both SL debuffs and Wrath Abatement takes top priority. Knowing what your target mob is capable of can do wonders to help you survive. If it's a mob you've never taken on before, ask folks who've soloed it and see what it's capable of doing in a fight, damage ranges and all. That should help you figure out what you need to keep an eye on to make sure you come out on top.

I would suggest, if you're just getting started soloing, to be very conservative (all evades, every evade, and lump on a heaping helping of AAD, etc) and get into the habit of using every debuff you have and keeping it on at all times during the fight...this will help you get into the mindset of knowing what you can do in the time between one fired Desecration of Resolve and the time you'll need to fire off the next one (I can get off 2-3 nukes or other things in that time). Learn the fine points of juggling aggro between your pets (even your mezzball) and keep the nanos to cast those hotbared where you can quickly get to them in the event one drops and you have to root and recast your pet.

Most of all, however, it's practice. The more practice you have soloing, the more confident and capable you are at it and the higher level mobs you'll be ready (and likely able) to take on.

[notalive]

Another great post.

One thing that a lot of newer players have problems with, (and I did too, trust me,) is "How the heck do I fit all this crap I gotta run on one hotbar?!?!?!" Simple, you dont. I've got one hotbar for debuffs and pet macro commands, second line on that is perk actions, 3rd is buffing, etc.

That's so true, I've been playing for more than 1 and a half year now, and I still have problems with it.

Now, what you wrote there confused me a bit. Recently I changed my setup and deleted all the nanoskill buffs below single mochams. I removed the program window for nano programs and opend up 3 hotbars to be able to see a bit more of the battlefield(Yes, I pay alot of attention to the chat to see when to press the debuffs and or perks etc.. I tried to get a decent setup which I could use relatively easly which isnt easy at all.

I have the active hotbar, with assist, /pet attack, mind quake, flingshot, burst... and so on, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0 has a few other macros that I dont use in battle, simply because I cant reach those buttons without looking at the keyboard( and that split second is enough for me to die. :P )

On that active toolbar I use 3 of the lines I can use ... shift+1, 2 and 3 witth the first as I mentioned for team play, and I have one for solo, and one for buffing, After all I use like, 6 buffs or so.

Composite mochams
Composite attribute boost
Composite nano
Evade buff
Odins missing eye
Cost
(should get composite ranged too, though)

Besides that I have two inactive hotbars with the debuffs and a soothing spirit and spirit of purity.(the last two just to make sure I can access them easier if I get into trouble. Most of the perks like Starfall, champion of light artillery, and so on I use the controls window to execute. I havent tried to use alt+1, 2 or 3 yet for switching hotbar in case I hit wrong and die.

You also mentioned CoC, that's curse of chronos, right? How the f do you land that? O_o

Edit: What confused me was, do you use 1 single hotbar and shift+1, 2, 3 and so on or do you have more than one hotbars you alt+1, 2 and 3 or so on?

Edit2: I said I deleted the nano skill buffs ... its about 30 buffs or so I deleted becuase I dont need it. I know others might want it but I cant do it that way anymore. I have started focusing on pvm and I will try to get alot better at it because I find it more interesting now that I understand and know more about it. I changed my setup completely and im allways looking for a better way of playing. I did not delete the buffs just to get rid of the buff beggers, but the buffs takes too much of my screen.(1280*1024 ;_; )

[Helamorious]

Having easy access to all of your setup certainly is important. Personally i run with 4 separate tool bars, each setup for a different "area" of expertise of our tool kit.

Firstly: Active Attack/Defence
- Assist macro's
- Weapon Specials
- Absorb shields ( Endurance boost and the old IS shoulder piece )
- Heal Perks
- Health Stims ( Both spindles and the ones from the archaic dungeons for emergency)

The Rest:

2: Pet Control
- Pet short buffs
- Pet perks
- Pet attack
- Pet root/snare remover

3: Perk Attacks
- Starfall Line (In order)
- Chaotic assumption line
- Ranger perk's
- Root perks

4: Debuffs
- SS
- Damage debuffs (top of A and B lines aswell as the rubika line )
- NSD/ENSD
- PvP debuffs ( heal efficiency, nano efficiency)
- CoC

You must know what debuffs are where. If you look at my debuff bar, there are only 3 different display icons, you cannot be checking which is which during a fight. Once you get your setup and get used to it, don't change it.

I never take focus away from my primary bar, my heals. At any point, i can reach to my numb keys and hit off my heals or absorbs. Everything else is under the three secondary bars... all my bot macro's, buff's, everything.

I also leave my inv. up for some things, like root grafts, extra heal kits, nano kits (i dont think ive used a single one for about a month :P ), lockpick, etc etc...

[notalive]

I agree. (I never use it, but I ahve the wear window open at all times ... :S )

I never were any first aid person, but I might start using first aid equipment. At lower levels, I usually had a medical back on the upper left side of my inventory, which containd basic nano rechargers, first aid kits etc. included lock pick for easy access, same with free movement stims. When I enter mission location I open that bag and keep it visible at all times. one bad thing about having those itmes in a bag is that you cant use them on the hotbar unless its in inventory. But now at higher levels my nanodelta/healdelta/soothing spirit perks and genious helps too much for it to be worth using(at least nano rechargers). I also have alot of items that reduce nano cost ... so nano isnt a problem really ... stupid nanomage -_-

Lol, I wish i knew the difference between nanomage and solitu like, 212,6 levels ago.