Dread Master Brontes and I have a long history. I'm not going to talk too much about that right now, because I already wrote a whole post about it back in 2019 and for the most part, what I said back then still applies - if you want to know the details, just go back and read it. The tl;dr version for our purposes today is that in the almost ten years since the release of Dread Fortress, I've never been able to kill the last boss in it on nightmare/master mode, despite spending a fair amount of time trying.
Not much changed since 2019... though I think we never even attempted the fight during the Onslaught patch cycle, as word on the street was that the boss's tuning was so out of whack that she was basically the hardest boss in the game at that point. Legacy of the Sith's operations tuning has had plenty of issues of its own, but Brontes' difficulty sounded like it had been dialled back down to more "normal" levels again, so we've been visiting her occasionally.
Specifically, my guild does 16-man progression one week a month, and last week we actually managed to clear Dread Fortress for the first time! One of Brontes' remaining orbs exploded just after she died and took out the remainders of our raid group, so you could technically call it a draw, but it still counted. Here's the kill video, consisting of footage from both myself and another officer who was playing a dps Vanguard:
It certainly felt like quite a milestone to finally get her down after all this time, though at the same time it feels a bit weird to think that the 8-man kill still eludes me. 16-man might be ever so slightly easier in terms of gameplay, especially as a healer, but then getting a 16-man progression group together in this game is much harder than finding an 8-man team, so it's kind of a wash in terms of overall effort I suppose.
At least the additional time spent on progressing the fight has taught me that it wasn't my healing that was at fault in the past, as I now understand a lot better what happens in the last phase (in the 2019 post I admitted that I found it hard to tell what was going wrong in our attempts). Basically it's almost always the tanks' fault - no shade intended, as they do have the hardest job in that part of the fight if not in the whole fight in general. It's just that everyone else is so busy with their own priorities towards the end, there isn't much time to keep an eye on everything the tanks are doing. And then one mess-up pretty much just results in the whole group getting obliterated without anyone being able to tell in the moment what exactly just happened.
I just hope I don't need to wait another ten years to tick the box for the 8-man achievement.
Hey, gratz!!
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