Congrats to the entire team for achieving the world's first trifecta in Sanity's Edge after putting a tremendous amount of effort in this trial despite struggling with desynced deaths on PTS.
My performance on this run was pretty awful overall, there are loads of mistakes on literally every fight, including trash, but that's pretty irrelevant on the big scheme of things and how meaningful this achievement is to me and to the rest of the team.
A huge thanks to everyone for being so engaged throughout our prog, especially Razor who has been coleading with me and played a key role in our success.
We tried to make every fight as safe as we could and played for consistency. I thought I'd elaborate on some choices behind our strats to possibly help groups progressing this trial.
Trash is pretty straight forward, we decided to have one tank taking virtually everything and the other tank chaining and applying buffs/debuffs.
For the first boss we decided to keep the boss and wamasu apart to avoid overlap of mechanics and fire bombs in group. Since most dangerous mechanics in the fight are HP threshold based, keeping them apart essentially allows you to control and prepare for each phase, significantly mitigating risks.
We had chosen an Arcanist DD to pick up ice tombs, since he can still do significant damage from distance to the Wamasu while casting Exhausting Fatecarver until he is frozen. Unfortunately we didn't have the arcanist DD ready for day 1, which made this fight pretty messy overall.
A damage race starts at 25%, which is when the boss casts shrapnel, and we try to burn through while he is stuck in animations. Our goal here was to skip the last 2 wamasus, with the group fully committing to burn the boss. We kinda failed the push in this run, but we still managed to get away no death so that's fine.
The disadvantage of having the Wamasu and boss apart is that it adds more pressure on the healers and MT, but we found this to be more consistent anyway.
For the second boss, the first part of the strat consists of understanding that the boss will summon 3 lightning AoEs that can be kited by supports, which allows dds to parse on the boss. We decided to take the boss far away to force everyone to move away from these aoes, which in turn allowed supports to always kite it by staying behind. DDs slotted self heals to survive inside the crystal room and we had a barrier from the MT to increase survivability further.
While still in PTS, we concluded that playing aggressively to nuke the chimera in one phase did not bring any benefits for a trifecta progression, since you can control who goes in which room after the first room.
So for the chimera phase, we have two supports on barrier and played relatively safe.
The tank swap happened after every meteor, since after the very first chain lightning, an inferno (meteor) will always precede the next chain lightning cast. So the tank who was not holding the boss would move far away, place his meteor far, and then taunt the boss.
During the next inferno, the opposite tank would do the same. Whoever was holding the boss, would place the meteor somewhere where dds are not standing.
The last boss was by far the hardest boss of the entire progression, and it largely explains why we ran the comp we chose for.
- Arcanist healer to be able to significantly mitigate the damage intake by using Chakram of Destiny, in combination with a spam of igneous shield and brands of imperium from the DK tank, and beckoning steel + frost blockade + gibbering shelter from the Arcanist tank.
- The arcanist tank also brought significant benefits for us here: faster portals due to higher pen, minor courage, sustain, reliable heal through conduit, completely independent out of group even with poison.
Our DK off healer with taunt was a pretty bad choice, since it doesn't offer much to the group from the class perspective. However, we were too far into the progression and decided it would be best to not change it since we were on a race. A better choice would have been a necromancer or another arcanist.
We decided to kill atronachs as a group, and propelling shield really helped with it. The MT would set it up so dds can target all atros while killing them from the middle.
Once atros were dead, we pushed the boss to split and nuked everything afterwards.
A damage race starts at this point since the longer we take, the more atros we have, and the damage taken eventually skyrockets.
Our counter to this was good damage in combination with soaking the damage using the shields mentioned above (this is why I spam blockades in execute, as a high source of the damage is from adds projectiles).
We were nervous as hell so performance took a hit, but great job by the entire team.
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Last but not least, congrats to the guys in Limit as well who managed to get the Trifecta in PTS and had a better score shortly after our run.
Feel free to ask questions below