Trapdoor is getting harder.

As of yesterday's patch, I can say with confidence that Trapdoor is noticeably harder. I cannot defeat him as a +2 EB on my Dark/Dark Corruptor without relying on the -regen in Howling Twilight and/or the lava. In fact, I can't keep him out of the lava any more, because I have to spend so much more time running around to defeat his Bifurcations. However, having him off on the side is now actually a significant inconvenience, because you have to go further away (and thus take more time) to find and then get to Bifurcations on the other side of the ... thing he's standing on at the start.

I've faced him twice now on this character, and defeated him once, but I've reset the mission both times to see if I can do it faster without relying on inspirations (I haven't used any yet) or without lowering my difficulty.

My second run basically went to hell because I tried to brute through the Bifurcations. With three active bifurcations, he was visibly healing while I attacked him, standing in lava, and immediately after I hit him with Howling Twilight (-500% regen for 30 seconds). I was getting low on end, and clearly had done worse than my first try, so I went ahead and reset it again.

Difficulty of the encounter aside, it's my opinion that this amount of chasing bifurcations (which I understand is a mix of his upgraded behavior and my difficulty settings) is pretty tedious.

Edit:

OK, third try, I defeated him as a +2 EB in about 2 minutes and 20 seconds. I did rely heavily on Howling Twilight to do it, but I not only didn't use the lava, I intentionally immobilized him on top of the tank (or whatever it is) so that I could go after Bifurcations from a central location.

I think what this suggests as a strategy for folks who are having a hard time beating his regen, is getting your hands on an [Envenomed Dagger]. When he pops a Bifurcation, stab him with the dagger and go running to find and defeat the Bifurcation. Each stab of the dagger that lands buys you 10 seconds where he likely will not benefit from the Bifurcation's existence.

I did FRAPS the fight. I'll see what my options are for uploading it to YouTube or somewhere similar. I don't presently have an account anywhere for it, and it's not a good size to upload for raw download.

Hmmm...I defeated him with my fire tank before the patch. I lured him to the hallway..when he bifurcated, the buff-pets were still between the rails by the center in the big room and were out of range. I never even killed them, just zeroed in on him. It will be interesting to try and duplicate what I did with another tank. If the buff-pets' range has been increased, might be a prob. I really enjoy soloing, and hope that this new change won't force anyone to team just to defeat him.

Like I said when this goes live, it's basically about making some people feel like zeros instead of being able to solo him without massive inspiration use and zerg-rushing.

Considering this is supposed to be about you standing out against all the 'other people' on your way to super-duper-I'm-finally-going-to-be-powerful, I actually really hate this change.

Still here, even after all this time!

I'm already done with Trapdoor, all 5 of my 50's unlocked Alpha Slot in the first week.

But I am curious. If I understand things correctly, Trapdoor can no longer be dragged out of range of his regenerators, and his regen has been buffed enough that he doesn't die from the lava.

Can he still be held by controllers and/or dominators? Did he get the Purple Triangles? I don't have anyone close enough to 50 to find out.

Sorry then. It was a pretty direct reply to me, and it expressed what seemed to be umbrage at my lack of identifying (something in) the room, so it seemed to be directing something negative my way.

No worries, though.

OK, my demo of my Dark/Dark Corr vs +2 EB Trapdoor finished uploading. The YouTube link is here.

I don't claim it to be any great shakes. I'm mostly posting it so people can see what I was doing, and something about what my character is like. I have lots of stats monitored on screen, but the YouTube version is kind of fugly, so it's hard to read. Let me know if you want to know more.

Here's the character's build.

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I'm fighting trapdoor on my level 50 bots/traps MM. He is a level 52EB. All my robots do 1pt of damage to him with all attacks even when he is debuffed by 2 poison traps and acid mortar. Any idea why? He has summoned over 100 clones. He summons them too fast to kill. I have soloed GMs with this character but cannot damage him. I thought the clones only buffed his regen? Do they also buff his damage resistance. Or does he have insane energy resistance?

And FYI, shivans are easy. Heres what you do:

1) Find a base without missile turrets
2) Beat all turrets down to a sliver of health (DO NO BLOW THEM UP DURING THIS STEP)
3) Starting at the furthest turret from the glowie you click on, start destroying the turrents
4) ???
5) Profit with your new shivan!

I destroyed him on my Sonic/Energy Blaster before this change, but something else may have changed with the new rules. I never had a problem with him with just my standard inspiration load that I take to EB fights to get them done with quickly, on any character before this change, but I'm not going to comment on what it's like now, since I don't have any characters that are 50 and haven't done it on live. I had to go through him when I was testing SOed builds during Beta to find what would have a problem with the Honoree. The FF/Psi Defender and Emp/Psi Defender handled him just fine while failing to beat Honoree below 1/2 of his HP because of a combination of no debuffs, low damage scalar, damage that he was natively 50% resistant to, and a fairly poor DPS attack chain. Trapdoor never even registered as more than a minor speedbump to me then on any of those builds.

The thing a lot of people don't understand about this game is that it sometimes just comes down to luck. You can stack the deck in your favor all you want but ultimately it comes down to a dice roll. My Fire Blaster has a number of IO sets which boost his Accuracy, and he has Accuracy slotted into his snipe. Before I snipe someone, I hit Build Up. So one would think that with massive accuracy out the wazoo snipe would hit every time. Yet it doesn't. It misses enough times to be noticeable. It's not a case of "Man, my snipe missed once back in July" but rather a case of it misses at least once in every other mission. Sometimes it misses twice in a row.

Trapdoor killed my AR Blaster with two hits, repeatedly. On top of that, his bifurcations spawned at an increased rate. That mission was a slogging hell of death after death without making any headway. So I asked a friend to help me. Based on what others have said and the video UberGuy put up, what happened to my Blaster was just bad luck. However, what the "LRN2PLY" crowd utterly fails to grasp is that some of these cakewalk encounters with him are people getting lucky. (For the pedants out there, notice that I said "some" and not "all.") In UberGuy's video, Trapdoor is whiffing shot after shot. Even on my easiest missions against him such as with the aforementioned Fire Blaster and my Brute, he definitely hit me a lot despite using purples and oranges. Nothing like that extraordinary string of misses displayed there.

And just as my snipe missing twice in a row, sometimes people can have a string of luck. If that's all you've seen, then I can understand how you would think that's how the encounter operates. Me, I did the mission four times and had it easy in three of them. However, in two of the four I saw the fast respawn rate.

About UberGuy's video. Dark powers have -to-hit, dark defenders even have a toggle that does -to-hit. So all those instances of Trapdoor missing were caused by power selection, not luck. The more you know!

And about the "fast respawn". Do you (or anyone else who had it) have a chat log, demorecord or Fraps of a fight were it happened ? If the spawn rate does vary to such a large extent then that is a bug and needs fixing. And having concrete examples/evidence will greatly increase the chances of devs (quickly) fixing it. "Better to light a candle than curse the darkness" and so on.

Im pretty sure the summoning rate is every 30 seconds. Thing is, 30 seconds seem to go by quickly, so it gives the illusion that hes summon more often then normal. Next time, time it. chances are it'll be within 30 seconds.