STF: How Many Ways to Defeat Ghost Widow?

So last night I busted out my Rad/Rad Defender and tried to start a Statesman TF up. Much to my surprise, it wasn't all that hard to get a group together.

Now I had a friend who had another friend who wanted to do it who was bringing a tank along, so I made sure to look for everything BUT a tank since I knew one was coming.

Nevertheless, I wound up with FOUR tanks on the team.

(My friend who was going to bring his Empath found out that only his Ice/Fire Tank was high enough to do the TF. The Troller I asked brought along his brother who brought a tank, the Scrapper had a friend who wanted to do it who was a Shield/Elec Tank ...)

So, final team was a Rad/Rad Defender (me), an Energy/EM Blaster, a Bs/Fire Scrapper (think that was what she was), a Shield/Elec tank, a Shield/WM, and an Ice/Storm Troller.

I built my Rad/Rad for TFs, so he has the full leadership path as well as Fallout, Mutate, and Emp.

It's been a while since I did the TF, and to be honest I forgot all about Ghost Widow's Melee Heal until we got to the final mission.

Because I fought about Ghost Widow's Melee Heal, and with four tanks along I figured that we should do fairly well at not dying, I asked the team if we wanted to try for a Masters, so we did.

We really did pretty well, all things considered. Our first death happened on the Thorn Tree mission. One of the tanks died before I could TP him to safety. I died in the AeonCorp building as I ran into Ice Mistral and her friends, and we had a team wipe when we stumbled onto Dr. Aeon without preoparation. (Okay, we had a couple of team wipes.) But we eventually managed to take care of him.

The Four AV fight proved to be a real pain because we kept drawing four, but we managed to take down every but Ghost Widow. (Mako was really surprisingly easy.)

Ghost Widow was our roadblock. I hit her with LR and EMP everytime they were up, and the Ice/Storm hit her with all his Trollery goodness, but every time we would ALMOST get her killed, she'd break out with her melee heals and be right back to full health.

After over an hour of wailing on her, we called it quits.

It wasn't a failure on anyone's part. We all did our best. We just didn't have the damage to seal the deal. Maybe if we hadn't gone for a Masters we could have popped Shivans and/or Nukes and taken her out.

But that got me to thinking ...

How many ways are there to defeat Ghost Widow?

Things I'm wondering about (some serious some not so much):

1. Is her self-heal auto-hit? If the meleers had managed to pop a bunch of lucks could we have kept her from getting enough of a heal to save herself? Could a Cold Defender or a FF Defender have helped kept her from healing herself through defense?

2. Just how strong is the AV Mez Protection? Could a full team of Illusion Trollers have been able to deceive the other AVs long enough for them to beat her senseless? (For that matter, could a full team of Controllers manage to just hold her long enough to kill her?)


Also, can the AVs be slept so that you only pull one at a time?

You can make her miss by having enough purples. What I've found works with that many melee characters is to have one main taunt tank that does just that and uses a few ranged attacks and stays back at range. She'll chase that tank around, trying to get into melee, but you can keep backing off, taunting, and using a few range attacks as fillers.

With her concentrating on that one, the other melee characters can do their thing, and she won't use the heal, since she's trying to get to the taunt tank.

If that breaks down, you can also have what melee characters have several range attacks stay back and uses those, and only keep one or two in close. Those doing the range can get in some "run by" attacks in on her...you just don't want them stopping in melee range in case she does her heal.


That's just a couple things teams I've been on have done successfully.

Out of PToD, AV mez protection isn't really stronger than boss mez protection, in my experience.

The Clockwork Immobilizer Mk. IV, for the final Synapse TF mission against the Clockwork King, holds him through PToD... and is something like Magnitude 100.

PToD is everything but Sleep and Immobilize, 50 pts. of protection.

I find GW pretty darn fast to be able to land multiple successive hits (melee). If you have an earth troller, you can use Quicksand to slow her down as she's trying to catch up to the taunting tank (anything ranged with slow might work too). Gang up on her then, but still gotta be careful since it's possible that she'll just turn around and heal off of you if the tank loses aggro.

Best method (IMO) is to either have (perma) Phantom Army tank her while everyone else wails at her from range or immobilize her and have a tanker taunt her from range while everyone else fights her at melee or range.

GW has three self heals:

Life Drain, which is an AoE targeted self-heal version of Dark Blast's Life Drain;

Dark Regeneration, another AoE targeted self heal; and,

Twilight Grasp, a ranged targeted self heal.

None are auto-hit, which means jumping to Ozone and filling up on purples if you're a melee-er is your best strategy.

Now, if GW is immobilized and a Tanker is taunting and holding agro from a distance, then GW will still heal with Twilight Grasp, but the other two self heals won't go off.

So, here's the question, in this scenario, if a scrapper steps in for melee, will GW use the AoE heals even though her agro is held by a Tanker at a distance? Because if she does, then she definitely will heal off of them.

Now, even if you're a melee-er and GW heals off of you, that's perfectly fine if you're doing more damage than she heals from you.... in theory.

I haven't done a lot of STFs and the ones I have done I've been bringing either Blasters or Force Field defenders... I have never been on a team so melee-heavy we couldn't beat Ghost Widow.

Force Fields helped enough on Nosferatu with a bunch of meleers, but I can't guarantee that will work on Ghost Widow. She's a whole different metaphor of pain.

With 4 tanks on your team, it would really depend on if you had an immob/slow.

Given that many melee can do enough damage to steal aggro from your taunter, I would have dragged her near the boat then immobed and slowed her so the boat people can help. The Longbow and turrets should have helped with enough ranged damage to make sure she couldn't heal faster than the incoming damage.

Also having the other 3 tanks turn off their taunt auras and slug away at her should have done the trick.

We tried that. Didn't work. The boat didn't attack her, and she slaughtered the Longbow.

The guns may have attacked her once while I was rezzing in the hospital room. She destroyed them.

Did the TF again last night with a more damage heavy team. We did the taunting thing from a distance and she went down like a house of cards.

I'm putting my theory up against your practice, but I'd suggest 45+% Defense instead of 40+%. If you have [say] 4 people around GW and she hits the AOE heal, even if everyone's capped she has roughly a 40% chance of getting back a third of her health. Which is a lot. If they're at 40% Defense she has an 80% chance of getting back a third.

Small point, I realize.