WildStar System Daemons Guide

WildStar System Daemons Guide by Errc

Introduction

Hey I am Errc from Hindsight. Our guild recently downed Daemons for the first time and I wanted to give some insight to the fight for guilds that are working on it or are starting to research it. I am part of the team for Hindsight that researches fights and attempts to form a preliminary strategy for fights for our first attempts. Obviously many parts change as we get experience and I just wanted to share some of the things we learned in our ~200 wipes before our first kill.

This isn’t a read for your average raider. This would be much more for raid leaders to form a strat for a guild and get some of the finer details of the fight to adjust how it is currently done. So that they have a good idea how to start on the first night. Your average raider might check it out for their role specifically to see if there is any new information included.

It is a difficult fight for the opening boss of 40 mans in the sense that it requires an extreme amount of coordination and precision, but none of the mechanics by themselves are particularly difficult. Simply executing for 10 minutes with minimal mistakes is the challenge. An early death usually means a wipe while learning the fight, so a simplified strategy can help alleviate points where people are in a position to die.

I will give a brief explanation of the different abilities and phases then speak about the strategy we used and some of the pain points we encountered. Obviously there are many ways to handle the fight, but we think this is the easiest way to learn and execute the fight. If you have any questions feel free to shoot me a pm at Errc Horex@Warhound.

Here is a link to a copy of our spreadsheet that we used. I will talk about the different roles and a few things that might be different from other guilds later .Not any hard requirements for classes other than kick tank having to be a warrior.

General Fight Notes

• Five Phases: Add Phase until 70.0%-> Pillar Phase(3 sets of 2 pillars each)-> Add Phase until 30.0% -> Pillar Phase (4 sets of 2 pillars each -> Add phase until dead.

Abilities

• Purge/Aids – Red circles around someone that spreads to others if standing in it after it blows up. No debuffs available for it. Happens about every 15s, swapping sides after the first random one.
• Square Telegraph – Stationary telegraph to move out of. Periodically throughout the fight.
• Disconnect – Top person on aggro table is sent to add room. Memory Wipes immediately follows this, which wipes all aggro. 5s cast followed by a 2.5s cast. Happens 40s into the fight then every 60s during add phase. Happens at the end of pillar phase and starts the 60s timer again.
• Power Surge – 3s channel that does raid wide damage. If it completes the firewall goes up 10%. 2IA and must be kicked. Every 14s or so?
• Upload/Download – Final Phase only – Pulls in /Knocks back people and have to dodge a telegraph that moves in or out.. Think circle things 2nd boss KV.

Strategy stuff – Purge

• The most important and most difficult part of this fight is not sharing aids. If you can clean this mechanic up then the rest of the fight is just learning the timings and you will kill the boss quickly.
• We have a timer for purge and know when it is going to be cast north/south every time. We have someone calling it out constantly and it is the major focus of your RL calls because it is pretty much the only thing that kills people.

• When you have purge if you double jump right before it goes off, then it reduces the telegraph around your feet, and we are fairly sure that it actually reduces the hitbox so it is worth doing.

• The best thing to do to handle purge is to SPREAD OUT. You can’t be on top of another player, learn to spread out and just find your own little spot. This means don’t go stand in the yellow circle for medic crit buff, power link meh, your dps doesn’t matter and just don’t share the aids…
• Our handling is generally “stand still, unless absolutely necessary that you move”.
• 9/10 times people should just statue and then double jump. Let other people move away from you and it is easy. However, if multiple purges are stacked or you are in a shitty position or w/e and you feel that you must move then we always say just move with a purpose. Don’t dodge roll, don’t zig zag, don’t change direction. Pick a direction and own it and get to a better spot.
• This lets other people adjust to you because you are not doing something unpredictable.

• During add phases, purge isn’t too difficult other than going in and coming out of the teleporter. You can’t take it downstairs, or bad things will happen, and coming up people tend to be stacked so handling can be a bit tricky.
• We call out purges 5s before they occur so people know when they are coming. If they are about to come up or go down they adjust by waiting for it to happen or acting quickly to be able to get to the new position before it occurs.

• Pillar phase purges kill far more people than add phase because everyone is upstairs and there is a lot of movement.
• It just needs to be handled better by spreading out all around pillars and not getting greedy. If you have to stop dps to spread out, that is better than wiping because you wanted that extra 5s of dps and killed 2 people.
• We are very melee heavy, thus spreading melee around pillars was very rough. We spent 1 night where every attempt our RL would call out every purge and everyone had to run away from the pillar and spread out. We would stop dps for 5s each purge just to drill this, for 30 pulls or more. Sure it isn’t feasible, but purge wasn’t an issue in that phase after that night because people know the priority and found a happy medium of dpsing and spreading the rest of our pulls.

• In pillar phase you will see the tank, kicker, and tank healer buzzing around the room to pillars, gtfo the way if they have purge. They can not stand still unfortunately so make sure you keep an eye on this and don’t get greedy for that dps.

Strategy stuff – Boss Duty

Power Surge/Kick Tank

• This is one of the major abilities that needs to be handle quickly and consistently throughout the entire fight. A channel that goes for too long will likely kill someone.
• Each time you interrupt the ability you get a stacking debuff that makes you take 10% more damage, that stacks up to 5 times, until you go downstairs for 15s to get rid of it.
• This mechanic we handle differently than most/all guilds out there. Most guilds have 2 warrior/engi on each boss that swap off between kicks, whereas we use a single “kick tank” on each that handles all kicks.
• We started out with the 2 warrior strat, but ran into an issue where that required communication and they tended to die often. So we swapped to a single support/tank warrior that brings very little to the fight other than removing this ability from the fight.
• They use this build and both are in tank gear and stance with the interrupt gadget (from technologist) allowing them to hit virtually every kick by themselves, while being mostly indestructible. This is particularly helpful in pillar phases where there is a lot more damage going out because they need to on top of the kicks without dying.
• If they get several surge ticks in a row then it is possible that they would need assistance but only a single kick, which should be provided by the dps on the boss.
• The dps on the boss are instructed to throw 1-2 kicks on each surge if possible or everything if the cast gets beyond 1.5s. While not needed usually, this helps it gets kicked faster.

Boss Dps

• We have 3 dps on each boss, 1 stalker, 1 medic, and 1 engi. Their purpose is to keep damage on boss to allow us push phases when we want and to control percentages.
• We picked stalker and medic because they bring the least utility to add room, while providing the highest single target dps. The engi is just another person with high ST damage and provides debuffs to help out with everyone.
• These are our top dpsers to enable us to push through phases more quickly so that the number of add waves are minimized.
• If you are lacking a little damage to push when you want you might consider keeping an additional 1 or 2 dps up during the first little add phase and have the rest blow CDs to get that extra boost. We have had 1 additional stalker stay topside for the first wave to get 1-2 extra percent.
• If one of the bosses starts falling behind then we have one of these guys swap sides temporarily to even it up.
• These guys also help out with interrupts just to ensure the kick tank is fine. And can go downstairs to drop stacks or help on adds as needed.

Disconnect/Floater Tank

• Our 5th real tank for the fight… Many guilds 4 tank this encounter presumably swapping add/main tank for each disconnect. While this is possible, we found that the timing is at times less than perfect sometimes and requires closely monitoring the timer.
• We have tried 4 tanking and found it more trouble than it was worth. With 5 tanks it allows the other 4 tanks to optimize their las for a single role and to get really good at that role.
• A warrior or stalker can fill this role with leap. Their sole purpose is to remove disconnect as a mechanic requiring no further communication other than north/south being disconnected.
• They hang out in the middle of the room at appropriate times/all the time just jumping to the proper side and taunting after memory wipe is complete and holding it until the primary tank comes back.

Tanking

• Tanking for most of this fight minus pillar phase is mostly mindless. You want to position him about halfway from where he starts to the center circle so that dps can spread out easily to avoid the purge.
• No real particular tanks are needed. The south boss will typically hit a little harder for pillar phase so might consider the better geared tank there. We used 1 engi and 1 stalker, with the best geared tank on the north boss, so not optimal imo.
• I think stalker tanks on both bosses with T8 decimate up on both would be the best scenario because that means almost 20% less damage throughout the fight. The biggest thing though is you need intelligent tanks that are able to position with a purpose and understand what is going on in the pillar phases.

Adds!

• Adds spawn at 15s into the fight then every 50s after that except during pillar phase. 3 probes spawn 10s apart starting 10s after the add wave spawns. Or here is a graphic showing some timers.
• If adds reach the other side of the room they start channeling and the firewall increases. Once firewall hits 100% the adds teleport to the main floor and are untargetable and controllable and will wipe you shortly.
• All waves are either 3 little adds, or 1 big add. The fight starts with 2 waves of little adds, then it alternates big -> little -> big -> little etc for the rest of the fight.
• You go through the teleporters on each side to get to each respective add room, and while down there you get a stacking debuff decreasing your healing/dps by 1.5% per stack. You get rid of this debuff by being in the boss room for 15s.
• I see a lot of guilds have 3 or more groups to manage when each group is down and there seems to be a lot of downtime and confusion that can be improved on. This is not a dps race kind of fight at all, but each additional wave of adds is another potential death so making this clean while minimizing the number of waves is very beneficially.

• We use two groups that reset their stacks after almost every wave (Control and Dps). This makes it very rhythmic with everyone going down every wave, doing their job, then coming back up and smacking the boss some more.
• This strat is similar/identical to what Engima does and was chosen because it was simple and very effective at the same time and seemed to have the least downtime for any one group.

• This doesn’t change for the add phase after first pillar phase at all. Does for the final add phase but I will get to that. There isn’t set times for adds after first pillar phase, but it is still the same 50s timer so just have to know when to track that. The first add wave spawns 5s after the disconnect after pillar phase, so that is how we know.

Control Group – Little adds

• This group goes down 5-8s before each wave spawns. So at 0:08, 1:00, and 1:50 for the first 3 add waves. You just need to be down there by the time add spawns to do your job.
• The slingers on each side are responsible for pulling little adds to the tank in the middle. They just QD an add then run THROUGH the tank so that the add will walk to the tank, even if it is ranged. This is arguably the most important thing in the add room beside interrupts.
• The espers need to keep the probes in place before the dps group shows up to clean house. The healing esper typically crushs/restraints the first probe on top of the adds, and the other esper can do the 2nd or help with first. It doesn’t matter too much how it happens as long as the probes don’t leave the group. As soon as probes start getting through the group it is hard to cleave and you start falling behind.
• Tank just taunts when all adds are in range and keeps aggro.
• Slingers are also responsible for the first interrupt that will always happen before the dps get down. There is a big circle that MUST be interrupted, and the sword guy will be a frontal cleave thing + charge that should be interrupted. If casts are going off it is likely going to wipe the group either immediately or slowly as you fall behind. Adds only have 2 IA so 2 ss can manage this easily.
• Control group leaves as soon as the 3 little adds die. They need to make sure they get a reset before they need to be back down.

Dps Group – Little adds

• Clean up crew pretty much. They go right as the first probe spawns, so at 0:25, 1:15,basically 15 seconds after the control group.
• Go down blow up the little adds, cleave/kick probes and kill everything. You stick around and kill the 3rd probe before going back up.
• You can assign interrupt groups or we just go by the rule “Throw 1 kick on everything” and usually don’t have any issues. Also helps that we have 3+ warriors in each dps group, so other setups might have to adjust accordingly.

Note on Probes

• We found that root/knockdown/pull/anything but slow make these guys decide to race off. Try to avoid unnecessary pulls/kicks but it is also vital that you are not chasing them across the room. Find a good way to handle keeping them near your adds.

Big Add

• So this guy is either a big robot, who doesn’t really do anything major. Spread loosely so you don’t get lazer beamed when he turns and looks at someone.
• Or it is a spider, whom is more dangerous but dies more quickly. Spider cast 2 things, Black IC, which will kill you very quickly and Defrag, which is an aoe stun around 1 person that teleports people back to the top level. Typically these are cast back to back. Our dps are told to throw 1 kick on each cast and usually we don’t have an issue.

• For both big adds you want to spread out and blow cds and such to get the add down as quickly as possible.
• It is extremely important to handle probes well during this phase so that you don’t lose dps on the big adds. So try just to cleave/slow the probe while it is on top of the big add.

• Group stuff…. Control group goes down at the typical time (5s before spawn) and starts on the boss (if spider might have 1/2 interrupts before dps gets down). The dps group goes down as soon as their stacks drop. The sooner the better because then the big add dies more quickly.
• Both groups will almost certainly have to stay down for the next wave after the big add. For us there is usually 5-10s of downtime before the next wave spawns but not long enough for stack resets so everyone stays down for the next little wave before getting a stack reset. We always stay down because it is just cleaner and more consistent.
• You might consider having dps group reset stacks if there is plenty of time but it gets tight especially after 1st pillar phase if anyone is down or if CDs are not saved/used properly.
• Note – You can have some boss dps step down to provide more dps on these, it depends on how the dps looks for your group and when you are trying to push the phases.

Pillar Phases

• This phase starts as soon as 70.0% and 30.0% are hit. Once started no more adds will spawn until the end of the phase. Will talk about how to enter this phase in a section below.
• This phase lasts exactly 95s at which point adds will start their spawn timer again regardless of how many pillars are up.
• Generators will spawn in pairs and have lasers shooting out of them that do a little bit of damage. The next pair of generators will not spawn until both in the previous set do.
• Each generator is assigned to a single daemon, and you can see this by a thin line from the generator to the daemon.
• Each daemon gains a stacking debuff during this phase, ( south 10% more dmg done, north 10% less dmg taken each stack).
• After each generator dies it casts meltdown, that will get rid of the debuff from their assigned daemon as long as the daemon is hit by the cast. Will only purge a max of 5 stacks each meltdown though.

• In our experience this phase is by far the most dangerous, with purge, squares, surge, lasers, and meltdown all as damage sources you need to be very clean here to avoid dying.
• Also our goal in this phase is to get out of it as quickly as possible. If you finish it before the 95s you get some free dps time on the boss.
• We split this into 2 groups per daemon, tank/boss group and pillar group. The pillar group focuses solely on the pillars and killing them as quickly as possible, while the tank group moves with the boss to make sure the kicks are spot on.
• Look at this graphic or it is in the gdoc. This shows the position that each pillar will spawn, in what order and which daemon it is assigned to. So North daemon is assigned to N1->N2->N3 for pillar phase 1 and thne add N4 for phase 2. If you take the North daemon to a south pillar nothing will happen.

Pillar Group

• STAY ON YOUR SIDE. aka don’t follow the boss
• Kill pillars as quickly as possible unless told to hold off for the boss to get there (probably never worth it unless it is the north boss).
• After you kill a pillar move to the spawn location of your next pillar.
• South group goes S1->N2->S3 then S1->N2->S3->N4. As you can see these are all on the south side of the map still. North does similarly but the other pillars. You can see these listed in the doc.
• Note on 2nd Pillar phase – Save Cds for 2nd pillar. Aka N2/S2, in our strat these pillars are designed to melt very quickly so make sure it happens.
• There is a significant amount of purge handling going on in this phase that I will get to at the end.
• Cleave boss if easy to do but pillar is much more important to kill.
• You need to stay spread out during this phase. This is extremely important for purge handling. Don’t be afraid to leap/dash through the lazer, it doesn’t do a lot of damage but you by no means want to stand in it.

Boss Group

• Most people in this group are already always on the boss. We swap the engineer for a warrior for better kicks and because we are very melee heavy so want to get a melee away from the pillar for easier purges.
• Follow the boss around dpsing and cleaving pillar if safe to do so. Help the tank kicker kick the boss if you can, but don’t die for it because they should have it covered.

Tanking

• The most important part of this fight, tanking this phase. Tanks must be extremely smart and know what the hell is going on in this phase or it will get frustrating very quickly.
• The daemons can never get too close together or they will instant wipe the raid. If you see the circle around the center of the room, if they are both in that circle then they are likely too close. So you want to keep them just outside of it.
• You need to position the boss close to the pillar so that it is going to meltdown, but also so that if a surge is cast during the meltdown kick tanks can still hit it. Ideally cleavable while the pillar is still healthy then you move it to the edge right before meltdown starts. The latter part is most important so don’t worry about getting the extra damage.
• You need to make sure that you don’t panic. Move decisively and intelligently, know where your next pillar is, also know where the other daemon is. Be ready to move to the next pillar but not close enough to the other daemon. I typically tank it so that it is on the edge of the meltdown nearest to the next pillar, but still outside that center circle.
• You can’t dash and leap around like you have never tanked before because kickers still need to get surges and your medic healer will hate you.
• It takes a few attempts to make perfect but you need to pick it up very quickly. Nothing more frustrating than wiping a perfect attempt because the tank fucked up.
• It isn’t the end of the world if the boss doesn’t make it to a pillar, the last meltdown is the only one that matters truly because you don’t want stacks going into next phase.
• First Pillar Phase – Pretty easy. South tank goes from S1->S2->S3. Nothing fancy. Tanks just move to their right from S1->S2 and back. After S3 meltdowns move it back to initial tanking spot. North similarly on their side.

• Second Pillar Phase – The hard part. We tried doing the full pillar rotation, but it sucked. Tons of movement and consequently a large number of deaths. We decided on skipping the 2nd pillars for both daemons. The east side of the room has those ground effect that rise up that are a pain the ass to deal with and move around, so we don’t.
• We drag the bosses to the tank spot for each side and have dps groups nuke the 2nd pillar then move to the 3rd pillar for each boss. The biggest benefit of this is that it saves a huge amount of time because purge is not hitting the dps groups so they can blow up that pillar and then we can move into the 3rd position almost instantly because we are already near it’s position.
• After the 3rd pillar dies we move clockwise into positions for the 4th pillar. It is important to move quickly, but you must ensure you stay on the outside of the circle and not to close to the other boss.
• Oh by the way, one tank will probably get disconnected half way to the 4th pillar because it was too easy without a tank swap.
• As you can see after the 4th pillar the daemons are swapped sides, so south is north and north is south. We just leave it like this this and move to the proper positions and proceed accordingly.

Final Phase

• So you just got through the 2nd pillar phase and are 8-10min into the fight, you are almost there, if you have more than 35 people up then it should be a kill. If you have less than 30 then probably a wipe.
• First off, 1 strat out there atm is “fuck the challenge” and you make it a dps race to kill the boss before firewall hits 100% and you wipe because adds kill you. We started out doing this, and after a few <10% wipes (2%+3% one hurt…) decided we needed a better strat because entering the phase with ~38 people and still wiping with exceptional dps isn’t acceptable. We could of done this, but would of taken too many wipes to learn to kite adds and dps better.
• We decided that it would be easy to just delay the firewall for a little bit, because an extra minute or so is all that was needed to kill the boss.
• We send both of our control groups down (remember 1 tank is already down there because of disconnect) and the control groups sole purpose is to delay the firewall. You don’t need to kill the adds, don’t even need to pull them until they get close to the firewall. Focus on the probes and just tank/kite the adds.
• If the probes start channeling the firewall you can cc them for a moo. Just delay for as long as possible.
• If things get out of hand then just have the control groups go back upstairs to eek out that last bit of dps, but this strat made our first kill very easy because firewall hit 100% at like 2% boss hp instead of at 15%.

Phase Transitions

• So I have talked about all the various phases and alluded to the transitions, which are almost as important as the phases themselves, so here is how the transitions actually work.

Add -> Pillar

• This transition is all about timing it perfectly. If you are off by 1s, you will wipe. So as soon as the pillar phase is initiated adds stop spawning downstaris, but any adds down there do not disappear.

• Phase 1->Phase 2(first pillar) – You need to know when your guild can push this. We do it after 3 add waves (so after first big add), We have strong dps so an extra wave might be needed. If you can do it in 3 waves it makes the fight quite a bit easier for 2nd add phase.
• So we get the bosses to 70.5% hp then call off all dps from our boss dps and have them sit on their hands. Then we push at 2:40 or a few seconds before. There is a disconnect around 2:40 that you want to avoid and the next wave spawns at 2:45 so you must be pushed before that.
• The key is having your big add dead right as you push. If you push to early you are wasting valuable time in the pillar phase, but too late and another wave spawns / disconnect. Our big adds are usually at 200k as we push and we call for the push at right about 2:35 and it takes 5s to push it.
• This must be controlled and can’t “just happen”

• Phase 2->Phase 3 – Getting out of the first pillar phase is pretty easy. Since the pillar phase lasts exactly 95 seconds, we typically have 20s to 35s left before adds start back up. Just dps during this time.
• The tank will get disconnected with ~10s left in the pillar phase. This is a good indicator of when the transition is happening. When this happens send your control group down and they need to know when the add wave spawns. So if it spawns at 4:13 you know the next wave is 5:03 then 5:53 etc…
• Just continue add phase as normal once out of this.

• Phase 3->Phase 4(second pillar) – Almost identical to 1st add->pillar transition, usually a little longer and you have to pick when to push on the fly because the time will likely change each pull. We try to push right as we kill a big add because it makes kiting in the final phase easier.
• Phase 4->Phase 5(final phase) – This is a freaking mess usually. The timing is exactly the same as pillar phase 2, but you have 1 more pillar so we aren’t finished with the phase yet. 1 tank gets disconnected about half way to the 4th pillar, so have to handle the tank swap and still try to get it to the meltdown (good luck).
• Once you kill the final pillars and the daemons are on opposite sides of the map the final phase is in effect.

Addons

• We have an internal addon that a few people use to track purges and boss hp.. It has some major performance issues and isn’t ready for public uses. Here is a link to the addon codex uses (AariTv linked it here). I haven’t used it personally, it seems to track add timers, disconnect timer and purge timers.
• I would like to add boss health bars to Codex’s or release our own version, but can’t commit to it atm.

Other Notes

• We choose to 6 heal this and have an additional dps north side to adjust for the damage reduction in the pillar phase. I think 7 healing and just stacking your better dps north is a very smart idea and should allow for some additional room for error while learning the fight. You still need to make sure you are hitting dps marks to get stack resets and such though.
• It is helpful if the raid leader is in the control/dps group so they can accurately know when to push the boss and control going up and down better.
• If you have any questions feel free to send me a PM in-game or wherever and I will try to help out where I can.