Trapdoor

If you can solo the arc, then you have a good idea that your toon is worth the incarnate power. I use it as a test to see how good or bad my toon is. So far they have all passed.

My Elec/Elec perma dom just soloed that arc last night after dinging 50. Trapdoor was held, confused, and end drained before he got out a second bifurcation. Almost as easy as my DP/MM blaster soloing him.

The harder one to solo is the Hero1 + vanguard EB fight. If you can solo that you are ready for the incarnate trials. Hero1 even as an EB resists mez, so you have to have another stradegy for him.

Solo does not mean no temp powers, or insp candy. It just means you understand your toon, your weaknesses and you fix it up. Dont have enough damage, backup radio is cheap, so is a shivan, or a nuke. Also if you have not IOed up your toon, do you really think they deserve to do the end game content?

So far I've only done the Incarnate arc on my main, a bots/pain blastermind, and even then I usually had help.

On Trapdoor, my strategy is the same as any other mob fight:

• Sic the bots on the AVs, EBs, and Bosses, prioritized in that order.
• Pick off the Lieutenants and Minions with the Plasma Rifle, pausing to heal/buff bots and teammates as needed.
• Emerge triumphant.

I had just the opposite experience re Trapdoor compared to the Honoree/Captain Holtz mission. With my tanks (I have 3 50s) it was a real struggle to keep up with Trapdoor's regen from the bifurcations and I couldn't get the lava trick to work reliably. (None were fire tanks, unfortunately.)

I found the Honoree/Holtz mission to be annoying, but not hard. First time through my Invul tank just plowed in and defeated all the Rikti around the portals plus the two EBs. Took a while, but it worked.

If you don't want to work your way through the tons of no-reward Rikti around the portals, I found that pulling the two EBs separately and sniping the portals in the back with ranged attacks works wells.

The real PITA with this mission is getting hit by the blankety-blank Curse of Weakness. Once I figured out what was going on I learned to retreat until it wore off; not much point trying to fight an EB with not enough end for armors or attacks. Most of my 50s got hit with once during the mish, my Invul/EM got it THREE TIMES. Grrr.

I have had no problem with Trapdoor solo on all of my Illusion controllers . . Ill/Rad, Ill/TA, Ill/Storm and Ill/Cold. My Earth/Storm handled him pretty easily. My tanks and scrappers handled him easily. I have had a little bit of problem with blasters, defenders and a few low-damage controllers, so I teamed on those guys.

This whole process is just too much of a chore and, like someone said previously on this thread, I'm just too lazy. My script goes like this:

1) Enter mission solo, run to Trapdoor
2) Log in 2nd account to bring in either Trapper, Mind Dom or whatever my main control and/or debuff toon is for that server. Defeating him is easy with solid debuffs and trivial when he's perma-held.
3) Do the talk-tos
4) Drop the Honoree mission. This is where 2 toons are helpful, since you need to zone to Oro twice in a short period.
5) Repeat steps 1 & 2 for minotaur. No he's not nearly as challenging as Trapdoor, but just for speed.
6) Shard time!

Anyway, when someone says "I'm having trouble" and the response is "Huh? It was easy for me", I can't imagine that's being very helpful for whoever is seeking help. My #1 advice is to get a teammate. Any should do, but if you can add any of the buff/debuff classes or control ATs, all the better. A request in either a private channel (like one your SG may have) or a public one for your server will quite likely get you some help. Personally speaking, unless I'm on a tf, I usually give a few minutes to give a hand with one my Trapdoor killers.

wow i fought him for about 45 minutes on my tank before i realized i couldnt kill him. at first i just let the copies go figuring wth, i can kill him before they get annoying. then i realized he was regenning faster than i could damage and it seemed like he had about 20 of them out so i started killing them and eventually knocked them all out, then went back to him, got him in the lava and started wailing on him, but i would run out of endurance before he died. so then i got smart and asked for some help and a scrapper came and punked him down for me, was real easy at that point. that guy was a pain, felt titanic me and him hitting each for that long though, that part was fun.

Between beta and live - including testing for writing that mini-guide - I'm somewhere around 70 solo beatings of Trapdoor using 21 different characters representing every AT except MM and Corr.

In my experience, it seems like the people who have the most trouble with Trapdoor are the ones that don't know they're supposed to take out the Bifurcations.

I must have helped at least a dozen people defeat Trapdoor who completely freak that he goes down so easily when we defeat the Bifs as they appear.

I solo'd him easily on my AR/Dev blaster and my Merc/Traps MM, but that was before the lava trick got nerfed. Tried him on my Dark/Sonic def and I couldn't do it until I got a lucky KB from Nemesis Staff and he ended up in a ragdoll hold. After that I used the "evil wife from hell" tactic and screamed at him until he died.

Fun fact: if he can't stand, he can't bifurcate.

Edit: Also, the Merc/Traps had an awesome epic battle on the Rikti mish following Trapdoor. I'd had trouble with the final room, not because of the EBs but because of the multiple portals filling the room with 100 or so rikti minions who whittled me down to nothing. So, I loaded up a tray full of purples and charged in, blasting everything in sight, resummoning as minions died, and dropping Trip mines mid-fight. The feel of the fight was just raw awesome.

The lava still appears to be working in the same old manner. Though in testing I had a harder than usual time getting Lil' Trappy to take his bath.