SPOILER culpit liveblogs fruma (complete)

Going to look at wiki pages for the Highlands SDs I've done already. See if there's a decipher.

...Yeah, there's not. I notice 'Kalkalrah' in the page for the Ragni Stela, which is... prior used.

This is kind of an obtuse check to get lore. Where are we supposed to learn a conlang? Cool idea, but is it practical? I probably won't know what any of this means until months in the future, when meandering lorists get around to filling the wiki pages.

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Okay, I've gone literally everywhere in the Highlands and I have not gotten Near to the A People's Sovereign SD. Where is it??? It's marked as Highlands??

 

Okay. Let's do it. Apotheosis.

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Stopwatch time.

 

This opening segment in Hyloch is... iffy. Really weird barriers and bad walls, missing interior on the newspaper store, etc. It's very short. Why have it? Also, the guard mobs interfere with the cutscenes, the bosses clip through the Slay walls, and Zeph's appearance is weird (it's hard to follow him moving around, and both him and Rex vanish immediately because they don't appear in fights).

The Queen references the big stump. I remember that. Her affection for Auburn is odd considering that she completely destroyed it that one time. What was it with that tree? She implies its fruit somehow empowered the rebels. And, failing in PR, she implies she thinks ideals of Love and Family are Baaad. Queen!! You know you need to promote families in a fascist state! It's very strange that she rants at us in front of an entire crowd. I bet that in about five seconds that'll be a plot point, since the propagandists are here.

...Wait. Is Zhiraok about to rebel? I theorised he'd be a turncoat way back when he was - important, not just a side character, but... I mean, now's the time. The rebellious member of the undervillain squad usually turns like, midpoint or endpoint, right?

Oh my god he is. I was right. My forgotten theory was correct. He's so sick of their incompetence, their disregard for him, and of the Queen's cavalier brutality that he's switching sides to protect His District. And because his blessing is time control, they can't catch him! He thinks, he acts, he organises so fast, he's dangerous as a rebel. He's an ideal leader! He can mobilise basically a whole district, both morally and logistically, and the latter at superhuman speed...

She is going to the dam with Tasim - another flood. Duh. Where does she get the water? Majin is getting his expected fight against us, in which we'll kill him, and because it's only Zhiraok with the resurrective immortality that I thought all Sovereigns had (back when I only knew Zhiraok), Majin will stay dead.

What are our last words? These are all good options. Except #2. #4 and #1 are the best. I think I'll take #1 - by being flippant and self-assured, we maximally insult him by treating him like he's not important, just a promise to fulfill. (The cutscene audience is poorly put-together; they don't return to an idle state after first turning around and mumbling to each other, so they look weird and frozen.)

Majin's tossed us... where? Is this real space, or a facsimile? He's clearly Cosmic-deranged, but it's hard to tell exactly how deranged - he might be fully corrupted at this point, with all of his flamboyance and assorted quirkiness being Cosmic madness, or it might be a subtle, nearly non-present effect, with those quirks being Just Majin.

Okay, he killed me immediately. I was distracted by itches and got oneshot by his charge attack. I'm not a good build for Majin, since almost all of my damage is Rainbow, but I have no idea how strong his elemental defenses are and I'm not inclined to get a full build change just to deal with one ludicrously high-health boss. I'll just chug a suite of potions, since I started collecting them.

Died at 4.3m. What a slog. Somehow Gikyo was worse, but it just... it just goes on forever. Why bother? Am I really going to build switch over this? Arduous, flow-breaking. You have to research, find items, buy items, powder them I guess... why bother? I'll just go in again with Morph and Cascade (turns out that Slow weapon I was recommended has lower DPS than Cascade, so there's no point using it).

 

Comet Crashing Crescendo is completely ridiculous. The comets nearly oneshot me, and how am I supposed to dodge them?

Someone has recommended a "Liffleaf Set" or a "Wynnbuilder Github dot Io Hint To Do It Yourself" or a "I Can Just Kill Him For You". I'll look at the Liffleaf stuff if I lose too much.

Majin is just. Ridiculous. Why is he like this?

Okay. Whatever. Liffmail. Two and a half LE. It's fine. I have sixteen stx. It's a boost to my health. Not entirely clear on what all the benefits here are, but seems to be Earth-weighted rainbow with... idk. Spellspam. I'm not spellspammer. My only spell to spam is Ice Snake.

And died again. Ugh. This thing reduces my elemental defense by 40%. Does that matter? Which IDs are fake and which are real? The DPS meter is fake. Are elemental defenses fake?

Died again... I've died too many times. Was the difference really those five potions I had?

Okay, knocked off two million health and then died. I am sick of this. I am going to give up. I am going to radio the Party Finder for help. Someone will undoubtedly slay Majin.

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This is really ruining my plans for today. I blocked out time under the assumption that I was going to be done with Apotheosis around 6 or 7. And here is Majin Thalas, here to spit in my face for not wanting to build super hard. Here is Majin Thalas, the man who is impossible to fight. Here I am, twiddling my thumbs. Nobody has joined the pfinder.

 

Okay someone showed up, I think a Riftwalker, and melted him. I can finally get going.

It seems like some of Majin's wild power hunger and flamboyance is indeed Cosmic mania overtaking him.

...he exploded.

I'm going to say to Zeph that Majin Thalas is dead. Passive voice. I mean, pseudocanonically, I'm not actually the one who did it, I just sat on a bench in Hyloch and scrolled Discord while waiting for someone to show up and kill him, because I wasn't going to go to the massive effort of rebuilding for the fight.

I suspect the dam boss will be Tasim, not the Queen. We've met him on dams and bridges before, and this is the middle of the quest.

Tasim apparently knows something of Two's personality. She, apparently, would be mad if the Auburn Forest was flooded again. Where does she come from? Is she related to the slaughtered Cursed revolt that was the subject of one SD?

The Queen's furious. Nothing she's thrown at us has worked. But she's reacting with anger - not fear. She's blaming her Sovereigns for incompetence - not being concerned about the fact that one fighter killed Majin, Gikyo, and twice Zhiraok. Meanwhile, two of her Sovereigns are rebelling, a third is willing to throw her under the bus, and the only remaining fighter for her is new and, probably, not very strong. Her empire is collapsing, but she refuses to see it, preferring instead to try to flex power she no longer has. And she refuses to see us. (Although, to be fair, some of the Extraordinary Power I often hype the player up with is non-diegetic, given that 'immunity to all fights that they did not start' is a purely extracanonically, medium-mandated ability.)

Ah, I missed a dialogue cue! Right during the dialogue before fighting Tasim. Luckily, I died, so I can retake it.

Right, he pulled out a phase change and obliterated me. Ugh. I don't have many skill potions.

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I think one of the reasons these bosses are a problem is that they just don't have large arenas. Especially Tasim. My combat style abuses Teleport randomly, and I can't really do that in such a narrow space. (I hated fighting Gikyo in part because of all of the arena problems.)

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I think I figured out where A People's Sovereign is supposed to be... but Nawild doesn't respond to my dye. I don't think this area works.

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Oh, no, I just need others.

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Okay, the discovery is either bugged or very poorly written. I have no idea what this 'glacier' is and attacking the cave does nothing.

Tasim is also completely unmanageable, so I guess I do have to go out of my way and get a brand new build. Waste of my time.

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Yeah I'll just throw in the towel for today. I allotted three hours to finish this quest, three hours is up, I've gotten like half of it.

 

Alright. I've come back. My build clearly doesn't work. So I'm going to use this build I was given instead. It's likely to be expensive, so I may figure out some arbitrary substitution for Stardew - it doesn't contribute stat points, so removing it won't screw with anything else too badly. I don't need to redistribute any SP to use the Dawnbreak I happen to have for some reason, so I'll tot up what everything else costs.

The cheapest Lament is 32 LE. It's the only 32 LE one on the market, with the next cheapest being 38 LE; however, although I'm not an item guy, I can tell it's marked down because of bad rolls. I found one for ~39 LE with fairly poor rolls, but good Water Damage, so I took that one. I'll later ask which rolls on a Lament are the most important, and will resell this one for exactly 39 LE. Good Water Damage, mid Mana Steal, rest of the rolls are bad.

Transparent Psyche is also, apparently, some kind of big deal. It's not as expensive as Lament, but it's still several LE and there's no unrolled ones. I found one for ~5 LE; similar to Lament, it's got relatively bad ones but one that seems good and seems important. I'm clearly running some build that's based on popular, quality-sensitive items. Good Mana Steal, Health Regen, and Main Attack Damage; the rest are bad.

Drown's cheaper. Found one with seemingly good rolls at 1.5 LE. The only bad one is Health Regen.

Pyrrhic Respite. Judging from which items on the Trade Market are most expensive (a technique I'll use for the rest that I've just figured out), I'm looking for good Health Regen and Water Damage. The cheapest ones are around 40 EB and unidentified; I'll chance on them. Bought one for 40, rolled for 12; good Water Damage but bad Health Regen. Rerolling it would be more expensive than buying a second and IDing it, so I bought a second for 41 EB and put it in storage. I'll resell it if I don't need it later.

The cheapest Stardews are 14 LE and the most expensive are 10 stacks. It seems like Spell Damage, Mana Steal, and Water Damage are what I need, although Thunder Damage seems to be important for some other build. But I'm not going to use Stardew, I'm going to use a random mythic boot that's not supposed to be in this build. Dawnbreak adds significant raw Main Attack Damage (although my Dawnbreak's roll on this is low, ~1400), automatic Super Slow attack speed (this will weaken my Ophanim damage somewhat, as far as I know; Lament is Slow, so it shouldn't be super debuffed), and mine has good Life and Mana Steal rolls (although it probably won't push me into positive LS).

Cistern Circlet. This is popular and pricey. As it's a Unique, I'm going to hit a few Auburn Forest caves before buying one, just in case I get unique rings from their chests. My first such cave rewarded on unique ring, a Prime. I obtained one Cistern Circlet in this way, alongside a smattering of accessories and legendaries to clog my Trade Market bank pages. The Circlet rolled bad Mana Regen; its Spell Damage was near-perfect, but was only +59, so clearly I have it for MR. Its reroll, however, also had bad MR. I did a second reroll, getting a half MR; this was worth 4 LE on the trade market, so a profit, but I went back for one more cave. Didn't get a Circlet, and had to buy a new bank page to cope with the number of other items I'd picked up, so moved on.

Equinox. The cheapest of the Equinoxen was 47 EB. I bought it. It seemed like it had the right rolls. 9% Water Damage.

Shattershard. This is pricey and it seems to exist for Spell Damage and Int points (I have enough spare SP to cover losing this). By coincidence, I'd picked up a Thought Energy during the Circlet run, Thought Energy having a stronger Spell Damage ID than Shattershard; however, it subtracts health and I don't have the SP to hit its Agility requirement. Upon examining Wynnbuilder, and applying the correct filters, I learned that the only viable bracelet after Shattershard was a Relos merchant item with 10% Spell Damage. This was only 21 EB, albeit untradable (so I can't recoup part of the cost if I get rid of it later). I accepted the price.

Malocchio. Found a perfect Water Spell Damage for 2 LE.

This concludes the build construction. I am now officially Not Doing Morph Anymore. It served me well, until it didn't. The total price was around 41 LE, give or take 2 LE*.I haven't followed this build exactly; frugality means my IDs may not be where they're expected to be, and I've made two substitutions, one of which is very obviously risky (switching a mythic boot for a different mythic boot). If I lose to Tasim several more times, I'll return to the thread commenting about my experience; it'll likely be because of my bad IDs or because of not using Stardew.

*I allotted myself 3 stacks for this build but ultimately chickened out and went for the cheap options available for the item. The person who gave me this build said it wouldn't fit in the 3 stack limit; given that I'd still be only at a stack with a Stardew of greater-than-worst quality, I suspect I'm expected to have invested a lot more in the IDs than I did. I don't have Wynntils, though, so I can't give numbers on the total quality of each item.

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I didn't factor in the price of the powders. I won't apply them yet; I have four T7 water powders, each of which is worth 6 LE, so if I apply all three that are demanded for the Lament and then have to replace the Lament, I may have lost 18 LE's worth of powders.

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I also didn't factor in my tomes. I don't like tomes, so I'm not changing any of them other than switching my rainbow (Assimilator) guild tome for an intelligence one.

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Wow, -15% walk speed from whatever I had before sucks bad. I'll probably end up using this build only during boss fights; Morph offers a number of advantages (speed, loot, combat exp if I'm in bat cave for whatever reason, not being negative HPR) to general world-roaming. This means I'll have to keep my Morph tome in my charbank.

 

lament prices are that low????

(shatter shard is the apotheosis quest reward)

 

I have a good horse, though. It's bad for caves, but travelling distances overland is fine.

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I see.

I died, but I got Tasim to about 6m before I died - not as far as I've gotten, he didn't phasechange and wasn't close to loss, but it wasn't a bad first showing.

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6.6m...

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4.6m. I'm learning Tasim's patterns, but unfortunately, the strategy I've found for dealing with him is 'lure him to one side of the arena then teleport to the other, Ice Snaking, mainattacking rarely when he gets close'. I am a Lightbender running a mana steal build. This is not a winning play.

 

Wynn ought to be more challenging. This statement was at the very least true two years ago. I am under the impression that sustain builds are in some sense mechanically unusual; they don't use health potions, they have little risk of dying in combat, but they prolong fights considerably. Wynn would usually expect you to be chugging health potions, avoiding attacks, and getting high damage combos; but with my Morphbender I could facetank virtually every enemy, only meeting a death risk in raids.

I think Fruma is an overcorrection.

I mean, the world enemies are fine. They're balanced. They're annoying, but they're not super dangerous. I didn't have unfun troubles in caves. But the quest bosses are just slogs. The game design problem is this:

• The more health a boss has, the bigger the punishment for dying; you will have to take longer to return to the point you were at previously.
• The more damage a boss has, the more likely a player will die.
• If you make a boss deal more damage while having more health, you increase the risk of death and increase the consequences of that risk.

Basically, Fruma bosses, as far as I can tell, tried to have it both ways and ended up being very, very tedious to fight.

I maintain a position expressed in General Suggestions that the solution is to cut their health. Attack patterns are fun, but when they're repeating over and over and over and over and over they lose that. Fruma bosses don't and shouldn't have enough attack variation to adequately fill their overinflated health pools. Gikyo, Majin, and Tasim were all deeply annoying; fighting Gikyo took like half an hour, because I had to spend most of the time dodging their attacks and healing, while I gave up on Majin and called someone from the party finder to kill him. I want to beat Tasim legitimately, but... it just takes so long. I haven't been timing how long it takes me to get to a given point in a fight, but I can tell you that it is too long. I think Tasim should lose maybe 30% of his health. That would put him around 5.4m health total. Majin? I don't know. I didn't fight him. He had too much health.

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If you think about it, it's clearly not universally bad because someone was able to kill Majin for me, in relatively short order. But such builds are probably Mythics and high-rolled items and overall extremely tailored; I don't think the main questline of Fruma should have its bosses be geared towards that coterie. (Perhaps there could be an ability, after you've finished Apotheosis, to refight Zhiraok, Gikyo, Majin, Tasim, etc. with inflated health and damage and perhaps new attacks, as a challenge for such players who were able to sweep the health-cut main bosses.)

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Looking through Wynncord because I hate myself IG (I'm trying to gauge how people feel about the Fruma quest bosses since the forum is quiet), and someone referred to the Stela as a 'rosetta stone'. Which, upon thinking about it, makes perfect sense. I was complaining, right next to the Stela (albeit facing towards the tunnel at the time), that there's no reasonable way to have a conlang for lorists. But if that stone lets you translate, then it makes more sense.

It's still a very significant difficulty spike; naturally transcribing the text from your screen to a notebook to then decipher is already a lot of effort (someone has to do it for it to get on the wiki), and then you have to translate it? Very, very few people are going to solve this mystery on their own; it's going to be a small community of loreheads working feverishly for about a week, cracking it, and then everyone else reading their translation.

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Honestly, I wonder whether the issue is that I'm not supposed to be fighting them alone. The Fruma WEs are extremely aggressive and even for players with strong builds apparently difficult to survive (I got spawnkilled doing Fossil Fighters alone, and someone else has complained of this); obviously, an endgame World Event is not supposed to be a solo fight, although max-size parties trivialise them. Could the same be true of the quest bosses?

If I construct this unproven position, I would strongly argue against it. This is stupid. I'm pretty sure most people are playing Wynn solo for main quest content. Quests and leveling are linear, long processes; if you were playing them with friends, you would be suffering from serious scheduling issues and also be limited by having to stay in lockstep with them. I doubt that most people are going through the quests of Fruma with any company. Therefore, assuming they are is a bad idea. Using the party finder to solve the problem doesn't work; there's not enough of a volume of Wynn players for there to consistently be enough people at this exact stage in this exact quest for one of them to find your party and join you, so instead the people you will get are likely to be friendly nukes who show up and obliterate the boss with you merely having to be present for the death. But this is, obviously, a straw position; if most players are, in fact, playing Fruma with friends, then it's reasonable and I'm a weirdo for playing alone, but more likely the CT didn't expect most players to be in groups, didn't build the bosses for groups, and so have some other reason why they are so ridiculously high-health.

(Is it really just my build? I noticed some improvement when I picked up the Lament set, but it didn't get me through Tasim. Am I just playing a specific build, or a specific lack-of-investment in build, and a specific playstyle which combined is something the Fruma quests don't support and consequently are brutal to? I've been told that Morph isn't supposed to be used at this level, but it's still serviceable for caves.)

 

Judging from dialogue, you are meant to fight them alone.

 

I mean... eeeh. It's a quest. Canonically you're doing it solo. I suppose most party-intended content is basically narrativeless; Raids are in a weird spot where they're like 1/4 canon. WEs don't have dialogue. The Forgery??

 

I should not be dying to Pest Technicians at level 120 using a level 120 build. Every region has its "problem mob", elks/more rarely trappers in Auburn, Pest Technicians in Roughworks, Kivaraptors in Mistwoods, and literally everything except Moorbadgers in Highlands, and also Kipchak in Aelumia. Bossfights being difficult isn't something I have much of an objection to: by being villains, especially video game villains, these characters (except Gikyo) are given enough weight to the point where their bossfights should reflect that. Majin could use nerfs to his tracking attacks and could do without obliterating everything within 5 blocks of him, and Tasim should not have a tracking beam attack in that arena, but most other fights aren't that bad. And a bossfight is something you only have to deal with once per class, while these Pest Technicians are problematic no matter how many times I kill them.

Zhiraok, Gikyo, and Majin can be refought (in the same arena as regular quest-goers). Unsure about Tasim.

While I was trying to beat Majin, I switched my Lament Riftwalker build to be Lament Lightbender (albeit using the same items, but it's an EWA build and those don't suck that much for Lightbender) and noticed that my damage dropped ridiculously (I didn't have Distortion with the Lightbender build). You may want to sub into rift for damage, and considering I can decently get 100k-200k dps on a non-optimized build I think it may be less of a 'your build' problem and more of a 'your build is lightbender' problem.

 

So I've gone and scanned the Discord to see if other people are having my same complaint. After looking through a lot of threads, I found only one that was really complaining about Fruma bosses being too hard. This thread was bombed to -100 because the OP was asking for Fruma bosses to do less damage. They offhandedly noted that they were fighting Gikyo for a similar amount of time to me; someone replied saying that they should gear more towards DPS.

Fruma is endgame content. Endgame content should be hard. Therefore, Fruma should be hard. This is logically valid. My trouble is: these are main quests. They aren't optional. Wynn's expectations for the player's skill at building and fighting suddenly spike at this point (and only for the main quests; side content, aside from WEs, is easy, combat-wise), making bosses lethal. Simultaneously, the bosses are given massive health. In my read of game design, large health pools do not create meaningful difficulty; they create tedium. Bosses with larger health pools take longer to fight (and people do not have infinite time to play Wynncraft), and if you die to them, you are punished harder, because you have to reinvest that time. In the case of a boss that kills you often and punishes you hard for death, there is a multiplicative effect.

It's possible that Wynn wants me to change my build in response to different combats. The fact that bosses often have elemental resistances and weaknesses implies this. (Although Majin has rainbow defense. What does that mean? Is it even possible to build for neutral damage, given that AFAICT almost every item in the game is elemental?) But changing builds is hard, and Wynn signals to the player via the ability shard system* that they shouldn't do it too often. One incurs significant expense buying the new stuff for their build, they're likely to have to go out of game to learn how to make one or to get a popular build, and then they have to relearn combat, potentially from scratch.

It is much easier to just drop the boss health, especially when the bosses are getting in the way of the story. I could be done with Apotheosis by now if the bosses had been reasonable.

*Ability shards are an essentially symbolic cost - but symbolic costs are meaningful.

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On the first count: What I meant was that using Party Finder does not work in a balanced way. You're not going to find people of a similar power to yourself, turning a brutal slog into a fair challenge; you're going to find people who have ridiculous mythic 90% rolls builds and not be able to engage with the boss fight at all.

On the second count: One of the divergences I made when taking this build was not trading my ult for Riftwalker's Etheric Slash, Distortion, and, some other ability that gave +40% Ophanim damage. Distortion looked like it didn't add much damage, and I figured that having an ult was fun, and isn't it nice to have fun in a video game? Is it really that that makes Tasim still intractable?

 

The Flush

Blade of Purity/Longinus but I see your point

Idk, it just seemed like your main issue was that you couldn't deal damage. Obviously that's even with Dawn, as cool as Dawn is, so I gave a suggestion. No idea if it would work, just an idea to consider. (uh and also your complaint seems to be that boss health totals are too high, but again... unoptimized dps is enough to the point where if the boss health dropped significantly I might be able to kill most of the bosses within moments). Basically you might be able to do better and invest less time each time with distortion.

 

That wasn't hard.

 

I might as well give my thoughts on Fruma's bosses, although I am biased as someone who loves highly difficult games. Personally, I think the difficulty is fair. The apotheosis ones in particular are the game's penultimate challenge and serve as a barrier of entry to the raid, and one intended to prepare the player for the possibility of needing to solo the raid boss' last 20% health or clutch a challenge.

I also fought Tasim and Majin as a Paladin to see what the fights are like on a low-DPS and high-defense archetype. Majin stood out as a fight with a lot of clear moments for punishing him, especially when he's in the center of the arena. Other attacks have a well-telegraphed movement which you can focus on dodging, and you can then follow up with an attack. His rainbow defenses can be ignored.

For Tasim, movement is key. I was casting charge pretty often. He has some attacks (spear-throw for example) that deal a lot of damage, but there's a clear animation for when he's about to use them. My advice would be to stay somewhat near him while frequently teleporting (and healing every few teleports), while chipping away at him with ophanim and lightweaver orbs. Occasionally there will be a moment where he stays relatively still, so use that to get a burst of damage in.

These fights took 10 and 7 minutes respectively, but at the same time, I was tanky enough to not have to worry about dying. I recall Tasim especially was quicker on Battlemonk. I think longer fights are just a tradeoff of playing as the healer archetype. Also I use an ult too even if it might not be meta, I agree it's more fun!

(also as far as your build goes, dawnbreak is more of a heavy melee or thunder/fire item. I'd recommend something like Harbour or Hydrocurrent instead)

Also: I'd be happy to help you with Tasim if you'd like! Just let me know (or message me ingame) and I'll see when I'm available to help. As a paladin I won't be able to burst down the boss too quickly and I can help buff your defenses.

 

And I didn't find Tasim that hard

 

I’d personally recommend the Cosmic foundations set (Dark Matter, Gravity, Neutrino, Fermion) and cascade, as in my experience on riftwalker it absolutely tears through the bosses, mainly because they just can’t really kill you unless you actively try to die. I got through every single one first try so maybe try that instead. They should be decently cheap, IIRC

Personally, after completing the campaign 3 times on three classes the only time where I really struggled was on boltslinger archer with the new mythic; every other time it usually only took 1-5 tries to figure it out depending on the boss

 

I've sold Cosmic Foundations stuff before. I... already have a set of low-roll items that I got off Trade Market, including a Lament, but I'll, also pick up Cosmic Foundations I guess?? Probably isn't expensive??

What would I use for my accessories?

 

I just used, like, whatever would get me to the skill points needed. I think prism, prowess, and then the diamond fusion ring and necklace (although I think I used the gold necklace instead because I was too lazy to do LI two more times for the diamond one and the gold one got me to the cap anyways)