Rift Hammerknell Murdantix Guide

Rift Hammerknell Murdantix Guide by laughingskull

Murdantix is a very straight forward boss encounter that is simply meant to check your gear.

Murdantix has a 10 minute enrage timer. Because of this and the fact that he has 9.4 MILLION health, this is primarily a DPS race. In this fight mele dps is best because of the lack of mechanics that affect those in mele range. Ranged on the other hand MUST be spread out due to a mechanic called Demonic Blast. It works much like the ability called Spines of Earth that Anrak the Foul has in Gilded Prophecy. Standing to close to other ranged will result in a lot of damage dealt to you and those near you.

Murdantix will also cleave. This cleave puts a stacking de-buff on the tanks. The de-buff takes away a flat amount of armor as well as TOUGHNESS! You will need to tank swap roughly every 4 stacks. If you are the tank not tanking Murdantix at the time, do not stand in front of him as the cleave is the only way that the de-buff is applied to you.

Murdantix also has a stacking buff called Strength of Souls. He gains a stack every time ANYTHING dies in the fight. How nice of Trion to make sure extremely weak Rune Guard Soldiers try to be heroic. Constantly throughout the fight, Soldiers will enter the arena and will “assist” you and defeating Murdantix. To bad that once Murdantix does any sort of aoe ability, they fall over dead, adding a stack to his buff. There is no way to stop them from doing this however we found a constant kiting in a large circle will sometimes cause his aoe to NOT kill all of the soldiers. Also, at 25% health, he will summon imps. These imps are hostile and will attack you, but have hardly any health. They must die asap.

Murdantix will gain new abilities throughout the fight

At the start of the fight he does nearly nothing besides his base cleave, knock back, and having the little Rune Guard solders run to him.

At 75% he gains Demonic Blast. This is the ability that ranged dps MUST SPREAD OUT. Just stay a good ways away from all other ranged at all times. Murdantix will also begin dropping aoe circles on the ground. These are mostly to annoy the mele. Just do not stand in them.

At 50% he gains an ability called Soul Trauma. It is a cast ability that MUST be interrupted. Everyone in mele range who has an interrupt should try and interrupt it when they see it. It has a fairly fast cast time and thus mele must be ready for it. It goes off roughly every 10 seconds.

At 25% he will begin to summon the imps that i talked about earlier. Just have ranged quickly kill these. They only have around 1k health.

How our guild does this fight is we have the ranged stay spread out in the middle and we have the tanks kite Murdantix in a large oval shape around the room (oval going east to west). The reason we constantly kite him is
1) the aoe on the ground
2) the fact that some times the adds will not die if you are kiting him constantly
We run with minimum heals to maximize the DPS. We use 2 tanks (warrior and…dare i say it…a cleric). They tank swap initially at 4 stacks of the de-buff and then as soon as the stacks of said de-buff fall off. We maximize the amount of Mele dps due to mele dps not being gimped in this fight.

Also, our guild is not one of those who had Greenscale down in the first week. We have had GSB and ROS on farm for a while now and do not all have relics or all have full T1 Raid gear. On our first kill we hit the enrage timer right as we killed him. Video shown below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7KN1CvEot0
This fight will challenge guilds in similar situations.

Hopefully you found this guide helpful. A full video guide will be posted here when it is completed. Feel free to check out my YouTube channel for more Hammerknell content.