Can’t you already max out sanity drain loss and max sanity capacity at the cost of DPS in the spec tree?
do you get anything for completing it with 8 masks
Achievement, and title if you clear both SW and Org.
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You can get to 80% which was the old bfa cap.
90% is next week, which is literally double the reduction.
But this is irrelevant. Sanity drain already doesn’t matter at all. It’s just damage taken on some packs and unavoidable sanity damage from Rexxar / Thrall that’re going to kill you.
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The only challenge spike comes from being one-shot by avoidable sanity attacks, pulling too big and not prioritizing targets (Like not instakilling the 3 Dominators in the Drag pack who are all tightly packed together begging to be AoE’ed), or not bringing the right tools for a situation like Valley of Honor without an AoE way to slow, stun, root, or otherwise kite any swarmers you don’t one-shot.
Main gimmick to trivialize a lot of it is to wait for split personality images to spawn, then pull a group, rinse repeat so if it does pop up during combat, it would be after you killed the priority targets (like dominators). If you don’t have to worry about split personality, just go blasting and whenever kiting is required to just kite back the way you came.
you can do it as a group and bring the easy classes with you.
It’s almost like the 8 masks runs are tuned around the full tree unlock next week.
Shocking I know.
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… Making sure you have CDs for elites is like, common sense for any slightly challenging piece of content? :s It would be poorly tuned if you didn’t have to consider stuff like that.
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I’m waiting to unlock everything before I try 8 masks. My stress level don’t have time for that right now.
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Yeah this kinda disappointed me. I thought the idea of having ticking sanity drain was to force us to evaluate risk / efficiency against time but it seems that by the time we can unlock 8 masks sanity is already an afterthought outside of avoiding boss mechanics.
8 mask is certainly difficulty right now. I’m 682 BM and still it took many tries to put together a clean run. I’m sure it’s much worse for melee but here’s some of the things I learned along the way.
Pull slow, as others mentioned, it’s not a quick race. My two clears were both 40+ min.
Use consumables. Flask/pots/drums.
Find the bad potion in the hut and whisper yourself/use instance chat to make a record of it. If you know the bad pot, you’ll know which one restores sanity. Use them when you need to instead of when you find them. Grab buff potions as you go. If you don’t know the potion order, find a guide.
After the potion, clear to the zone buff mobs. There’s one up in the first area (blacksmith 10% dmg or inn 10% HP). And then one in either the Drag (transmog building 10% crit) or Valley of Spirits (backside of walkway where you enter. Mob named Bwemba 10% haste/movespeed).
Use major CDs on the elite mobs in each zone. Use only short CDs for Gamon, he’s not very dangerous unless he spawns at the start of a large pack. Try to avoid lining that up.
After getting your buffs go back to the Drag to clear, line of sight the boss’ void barrage behind the tree stump. Next clear to Rexxar so you can lust/drums him. I also recommend popping an orb on Rexxar so you can just stand on him and blast for it’s duration. Prioritze the boars when they come out. The pull before Rexxar at the top of the hill can be very dangerous and you may need CDs there too. If you do, don’t be afraid to run back to clear more mobs in other areas to spawn Gamon/wait for CDs/collect pots you skipped.
If you can clear the Drag and Rexxar, the hard part is over IMO. Go back and clear the Valley of Spirits and Wisdom. Dominator caster’s stun in the Drag and Valley of Wisdom must be kicked/CC’d. It is always their second cast and start’s with Touch.
If you make it to Thrall, lust again and kill boars first. Thrall alone isn’t that difficult. Side step the frontal, move in/out depending on which ring he is sundering, collect your golden orb and break his shield for that long cast. That’s all there is to him.
Use your other sanity orbs when you need one. I had one left up for Thrall both full clears I did.
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What unavoidable sanity does rexxar have? If you dps him slowly only one add comes out you can kick them. Then at the end when two come out most classes have an aoe stun.
Thats the point. right now its poorly tuned for some specs. Other specs just afk run through due to their toolkit and passive burst / aoe stun every pack like havoc dh.
yup and buggy ah.
frustrating.
And “the streamers” are releasing “guides” /pathetic
Thrall and Rexxar don’t have unavoidable sanity drains.
For Rexxar take your time during the first half of the encounter. Kill each pig as they spawn. For the two that come out at the same time, nuke them. You can interrupt / cc their casts. For the second half, don’t touch the void fleshbeasts.
Likewise for Thrall with the pigs he starts with. Hell pop down an orb when you engage Thrall to offset the pigs. The rest of Thralls abilties only drain sanity if you fail the mechanic. Move out of the frontal, burn the shield and stand in the safe donut.
Thrall will have unavoidable drain for the majority who are likely just zug-zugging the fight and not paying attention to his health. I was unable to break the shield at 50% to prevent that ability’s drain without CDs on 8-mask, but I also didn’t care much because I went in to the fight with full sanity.
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they nerf the benefit of Elite Extermination on the Nemesis spawns. Yeah it’d come across as a “fun detected” nerf but it’s made the sanity bar so trivial. Even without Multitudes active, it’s still possible to lazily clear a 7-mask run without using a single orb due to the additional sanity provided by them.
Considering they added both Multitudes and Nemesis at the same time, they definitely had to have known how broken it was, and when I was looking up exactly which new ones they added, I found a Blizzard post saying this:
Faceless Mask of the Nemesis: Your nemesis will spawn every 25 kills in a Horrific Vision. This nemesis is an Elite mob, has Sanity Breaker abilities, and awards Sanity via the Elite Extermination Tribute upgrade when killed.
Now there’s an important part in there, not just the fact that they intended the elite would still give sanity, but uh… Gamon definitely does not drain any sanity despite also having a buff that says he does in game too, so I’m wondering if maybe that will fixed/changed or if they just decided to get rid of that.
I think wait until all talents are unlocked before saying that it’s poorly tuned. You might be right, still.
Its class dependant. I’ve done it so far on my 679 hunter and my 661 havoc demon hunter. Dh is so disgustingly well suited to this content that it was so so so so much easier than the hunter which may be surprising for some to hear, but let me just clarify it real quick, on 8 mask if I don’t pull carefully my pet dies every pull, if I do pull carefully my pet potentially dies anyway on any pull with gamon. The scaling is such that the threat is mostly boss sanity stuff and the sheer amounts of damage that some of the trash(the swarmers) can put out.
One thing worth noting is unlike bfa we can drop orbs in combat. This makes rexxar trivial since if you drop an orb after the first two huffers you can get a real solid safety blanket when the double huffer drops at the end. Same with thrall as long as you maintain a good pace.
I was expecting his whirlwind to drain sanity since he doesn’t move while winding it up and so that spoke to me as a lifetime melee player to run out. Now I just laugh.