Zekvir Down!

I tried a bunch of times before the nerf and then twice today and got him down!!!

Granted this is on ? Difficulty, so not bragging, but to any other mages who wanted to know if they could do it, of course you can. Interrupts and blinks are the fight. I should have spec’d shimmer and or the shield from blink and would have gone smoother, because needed to blink as often as it was up.

I’ll let you know if I ever get the ?? Difficulty done. Also, if any mages have been successful please share your strat.

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Congrats! I haven’t attempted anything past 8 for now, but I think I’ll make an effort now.

Cheers, and congrats!

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I tried the ? level last night (I’m 604) and I got SMOKED! I’m a touch behind having just gotten back from vacation for 2 weeks, but at some point I’ll get the dang thing figured out. (Tried both FF and SS frost… neither made a difference for me)

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Just did “?” now at 610/Sunfury Fire and wasn’t bad at all. Just completely ignore the eggs and kick his cast, use alter time/shielded mirror images, blink out of the frontal and circle, and lust/burn him down. Took 3 tries. Sunfury Fire is prob the easiest given all the mobility and that he can’t be slowed anyway.

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Nice, I definitely could never ignore the egg, had to prioritize that, did you get the spider down with cleave damage? And How many spiders ended up coming out over the fight?

Maybe 2? I wasn’t paying attention to them and just blastwaved them to leave me alone lol. They def took a bunch of ignite damage though. Probably got a bit lucky with Hyperthermia procs so I could just run around blasting. Alter time is great when it’s clear he’s about to come whale on you because you can take a hit or two and then alter back and make him waddle back over.

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?? difficulty is definitely doable. I did it earlier this week after the nerfs as Sunfury Arcane (which is tuned a bit higher, so it may be rougher in other builds - not sure).

I had Brann as a healer, porcelain arrowhead / amorphous relic combo. Oddly enough, it felt easier when the relic gave me movement speed over the damage increase.

I had to make a talent loadout specifically to try to figure this out. Anything and everything defensive can help you. Tempest barrier, Diverted Energy, Energized Barriers, Flow of Time, Displacement, and Accumulative Shielding were all taken and used. Greater invis is unusable, so don’t bother with any of that. Same with anything AoE or Crowd control. They’re theoretically not necessary, but Blast Wave or Supernova / Dragon’s breath could be useful if you fail to break an egg.

The same rules on ? apply to ??. Dodge everything or you lose. You might survive a hit from some of the abilities, but it’ll go downhill quickly if you messed up

Do your best to break the eggs, but even if you fail, the spiders spawn with less health proportional to how much damage you dealt and can be finished off if you just barely missed it. But the important thing is you cannot afford to use your interrupt on the adds. Blast wave and supernova / gravity lapse will be your friend. You might even be able to stop their cast by polymorphing them quickly - just make sure you can break them out before the heal ticks too many times. It did also feel like the spiders don’t spam cast anymore. So if one does break out, you might be able to sit in an ice block until it gives up.

Counterspell needs to be saved for his heal. The dot damage isn’t great, but you can clear it from you with Energized Barriers. That means you can’t be casting your shield on cooldown. You will need to let him punch you in the face, unshielded, until he casts the dot. Then and only then can you put your shield up (to clear the dot and get your shield).

His melees still aren’t great, but they’re livable. Don’t be afraid to spend more time trying to kite and less time beating him up. Making use of Blink / Alter Time / Displacement (especially for the heal) can let you zip across the room and get a few seconds of reprieve - just be careful because the frontal is wider the further you are from him, so don’t strand yourself.

Oddly enough, I found his phase transition at 60% to be easier than the first half. I popped hero on pull to try to get to that phase faster. He does go immune during the transition. I managed to get an egg to spawn right around 61%, so I transitioned him and focused on the egg while he RP’d. After the transition he adds a rather long “don’t stand in the brown swirlies” channeled ability to his repertoire - but he’s casting the entire time it’s happening. Good use of ice floes or any other mobility makes this pretty trivial, so you can get a lot of good damage out without needing to worry about being hit.

He does start spawning portals with some abilities now, but I’m going to be fully honest with you all: I never quite picked up on how they work. I assume it’s “Don’t touch them” and “don’t stand in line with them” because I’m pretty sure they shoot orbs out of them. But I managed to get the kill without worrying too much about them, so if you’re having trouble with that part, I can’t help you.

All in all, post nerf, it did take a bit to get into the flow, but certainly not as much time as I spent pre-nerf. It’s one of those things where a single mistake could easily be the end of an attempt - you just need to make note of the mistake and give it another shot. Don’t be afraid to grab some verse food / flasks and make sure you have Healing Potions. Cavedweller’s Delight is also considered a combat potion, not a health potion, so they don’t share a cooldown with each other. If losing health is a bigger issue than dealing damage for you, use the delight instead of an offensive potion. It’ll save you money, too.

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Fantastic run down, thank you!

Was able to do it with a st frost build at least. The advice about tailoring a talent loadout is spot on, by the end I had stripped out everything I absolutely didn’t need like spellsteal, decurse, etc.

I ended up learning it by forcing myself to make sure the webs got killed no matter what so I never had to play around having a spider up. At 614 dps was good enough to finish a web outside of CDs as long as I made sure I had a few procs banked for them. I usually run ice floes in m+ but found shimmer gave me more room to breathe here when images are on cd.

Definitely reminds me of legion mage tower in that more gear will eventually make pain points like the webs trivial but you’ll never be able to completely ignore the mechanics.

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You covered pretty much everything. I just have one more tip. Towards the end you can ignore an egg entirely, polymorph the spider after it hatches and just focus on the boss instead to end the fight quicker. Just make sure you don’t do it too early or you might get another spider before you kill the boss and then it will get messy.

The only major change from “?” to “??” is the addition of his self heal, Regenerative Carapace or whatever it’s called, which necessitates that you save your Counterspell solely for interrupting it and forces you to deal with the DoT/slow in other ways. The slow isn’t really an issue for mages because we can blink/shimmer but the DoT in addition to all the other damage that goes out, especially his melee attacks, are the real problem which turns this into a battle of attrition.

It’s hard but it’s doable even now and will get substantially easier with better gear, it is tuned for ilvl 620+ after all.

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