Grand Stairs Hard Mode - Some may find spoilers within

Hopefully we will be doing many more of the same soon Ellentar. The hope is to get us all used to running some instances (I am far from familiar with most of them myself) and hopefully get many of our members some nice equipment in the process.

I am afraid I have nothing to add tactics wise, and am going to do a bit of research online this afternoon.

One thing I will mention is the second attempt where it went most wrong for me. I think it's because I ran in last, but the devoted would not leave me alone for a moment. This meant I could hardly heal anyone else.

I think I need to run in quite promptly at the start to stop that from happening again. He certainly is devoted... to being a huge unstoppable pain in my rear!

Dantus and Flame have also done this a few times and have a bit of strategy advice for the final boss. I don't think I'm giving much away now in terms of secrets as I'm sure that we have all done the instance many times.

After having been through many combinations my personal choice would be as follows.

Guardian to take on the archers and the devoted with a dedicated minstrel. The guardian now has enough threat to keep all 3 occupied providing the minstrel uses the lute and strings of greater subtlety.

The attack on Igash works well with a hunter, champ to keep him occupied and a rune-keeper who can do massive damage whilst kiting. These 3 also have a dedicated healer. As damage is being done by the RK whilst kiting, the minstrel looking after the 3 offensive fellows maintains enough power to heal all 3.

Two hunters and a burgler proved nowhere near as effective. Also had a champion at one stage who decided it would be a brave thing to just stand in front of Igash and tank him in fervour mode. Needless to say he didn't last very long.

This is quite a hard final boss for only one minstrel without a lore master or a captain.
I would personally always recommend two minstrels, especially as there are now greater numbers of us in the guild.

The thing that usually defeats the minstrel is the large AoE attack when Igash says "Let the darkness crush you". Pretty much everyone in the fellowship takes a large amount of damage, and the minstrel is left to heal a lot over a short period.

The way around this is for who ever has aggro to get out of line of sight as soon as the boss says this. breaking his los prevents the attack, and a lone minstrel can heal without any backup.

As Flame says though the best setup for this encounter is a guardian to tank the archers, a champ to kite Igash, minstrel (or course), loremaster and rest for dps.

The devoted you really just don't touch. As I understand it he aggro's randomly, and is best ignored. The archers shouldn't be killed if possible as they will simply respawn and most likely make a bee line for your minstrel.

Runekeepers are good because they can switch from dps to healing mode quite quickly.

I've done a bit of research about the last fight and discovered someuseful things.

1. The boss cannot be slowed! Hamstring, tar and other skills to slow have no effect. This was changed in book 7

2. The boss actually slows down as he gets hurt. After about 50k he gets slower and slower so the fight in theory should get easier.

3. Because of this, the best strategy is to use a single tank (or 2 if well coordinated) and not to kite him at the start of the fight. The tank should hold him steady and move him away only when he throws flames onto the floor.

4. There is no need to avoid his AoE attacks. It's too hard and his attack is complex enough so that you end up losing more health by trying to break line of sight. This is why 2 minstrels cope better than one when there are damage spikes.

5. There is one strategy that can work well if you don't have 2 minstrels and that is to use a burglar (lucky Sina!) to enrage the archers continually. The melee attacks they use are very weak so you can ignore them, much the same as the devoted. This frees up one tank to help with the boss. I'd be happy to try this although it can be tricky.

So the main point is - dps as much as possible at the start and tank the boss fixed. When he weakens he can be kited because he moves slower and the dps folks can still keep up with him. This sounds similar to the end fight at the Forges.

At least we have a few more ideas as to what to try without 2 minstrels!

What I have learned with Igash is he can be done in nearly any combination of classes. The main thing is to keep archers engaded in melee and who ever has agro on Igash has to keep him slowly moving around and avoid fire.

Igash has some nasty debuffs so people need to keep eyes open too. He does nasty wound wich reduces even guardian's armor to near nonexistant, so if no LM around, woundpots are your friend (Shouts something like: Think I found a break in your armor.).

He only does the huge AoE attack after certain amount of damage (can't remember) and due bug he sometimes does it twice in a row, meaning 4k damage to allmost everyone. I am not totally sure of this but I think AoE dosn't cover all room, as sometimes Mik hasn't been hit by it even when he is in LOS. Minstrel should stand as right as possible in the room and as Tiers found out, run in just after the one tankinig Igash. If possible she shouldn't heal much at start to reduce agro from archers. Fellowships heart after first large AoE attack makes life easier for all.

The person tanking archers should ideally not kill them and use as low damage weapon as possible, butterknife and frying pan from Mathom house are just what you need and look cute too. The devoted as annoying he is can be left to devote his time for escape. He dosn't hit hard, and is immune to cc and agro skills more or less. He also releases the archers from cc if he gets near them.

So in conclusion, my idea of this fight is, keep archers in melee and keep Igash on tanked while watching his fire attack and wound debuff. If this works, minstrel should only need to heal tanks and some group heals after AoE.

If I recall correctly we did this fight seven times in the last week. We killed him once, seemingly very easily, by kiting, the first time. We then came back and wiped four times in succession. On each of these occasions the fight lasted over twice as long as the successful runs (I could time the fights by the numbers of archers I went through). We then came back and killed him twice, tanking in place, and it was the fastest and most straightforward way.

The conclusion must be that the fights where we wiped were bugged, or had some different problem. The problem was not our survivability, as we were fighting for much longer in these fights until he finally got us. I went through nearly 3 sets of two archers during each of these fights. The problem was that Igash was not taking significant damage.

The archers are much easier to tank than I thought they would be, and I do think it is worth using a person to tank them. From my point of view (i.e. as a Warden), in both GS and the Forges, the trash fights are actually a bit trickier than the boss fights to pull off smoothly. This may be the way the Warden works, as I don't think it was the same for Lachlan. While one shouldn't kill the archers casually, it is not difficult getting aggro on the respawns, except that they can respawn in the middle of the Igash fight, leading to the archer tank picking up unexpected damage. They do not take any effort to keep aggroed, but they do use special attacks which are aggro independent, i.e. they suddenly break off and use a special attack on the rest of the fellowship which makes it look as if the tank is struggling to hold them when he is not.