[ Disclaimer, Create new user --- Wiki markup help, Install P99 ]
Plane of Hate Strategy Guide
Strategy Guide
This is a work-in-progress, please feel free to update any missing or incorrect information. The intended audience are raid officers but players of any rank are encouraged to read it. - Cerate Salve <Asgard>
So you feel your guild is ready to literally go to hell and back in your quest for loot, glory and the Norrathian way? The Plane of Hate is fickle mistress. It may reward your guild with fantastic riches such as class armor and epic quest items, or it may utterly destroy your guild with needlessly large trains and difficult corpse retrievals. If your guild has the resources to gather several groups of players, including several 58+ Warriors, Clerics, and Enchanters, you might be ready for the realm of Innoruuk. Other useful classes include skilled Monks for pulling, a Ranger or Druid for tracking down mini-bosses, a Shaman for buffs and slows, a Necro for DMF, and naturally a solid core of dps.
The most critical test of your guild's ability will be the break-in. Though primarily a crowd-control check, you'll also need sufficient dps and healing power to defeat mobs quickly. Organize your raid at the natural rally point of the West Commonlands Wizard spires. Although a single Wizard is sufficient, more Wizards will always make a break-in faster and easier. Your break-in team should include one or two of your best tanks, a shaman, a cleric or two, and one or more enchanters. A bard for additional crowd control and mana songs is nice, and durable dps such as Monks should also serve well. Organize the second team with similar priorities, and so on. Groups without a Wizard should only hold 5 members. When the Wizard ports one group up, they will immediately drop group, gate back to the WC spires, and ask to be invited to the next group. If the Wizard moves swiftly (and hopefully doesn't get disconnected on the zone loads), they will be able to port up an entire raid of dozens within several minutes.
As soon as you arrive in the devil's playground, you can expect to be beset with a number of aggressive, monstrous terrors. Remember your training, soldier! Your tank should be swift, focusing and calling assist immediately as the demons roll in, prioritizing impossible/difficult to mez mobs such as a spite golem, an ashenbone drake, and Thought destroyers. Assign off-tanks to these mobs if more than one appear in camp. Enchanters should mez the most dangerous mobs they can first, prioritize a forsaken revenant, a loathling lich, and Cleric of Innoruuk. Clerics and backup healers should prioritize keeping enchanters alive. If your enchanters are eating it often, assign an auxiliary shaman or druid to concentrate on flash healing them exclusively. Knights are also very helpful if they focus on taunting and Stunning/Shadow Vortexing their CC'd mobs.
Coordinate your melee dps to push mobs which cast Gate or Complete Heal. Spite golems are especially dangerous, because their magic immunity makes them impossible to stun, leaving melee push as your only hope of interrupting a gate. If any mobs do successfully gate, you should immediately begin wipe control procedures, camping all clerics, and having Necromancers flop, especially those capable of rezzing with EEs. Ask people who are summoned to type /loc before they die, to make corpse retrieval somewhat easier.
Your first camp location can be the very same building that you ported into. This building is in the southeast corner of the first floor of the zone, and you should encourage your casters to remain standing until the initial break-in is under control, then sit in the southeast corner inside of that building. Besides the obvious horde of demons clawing at your back, your number two priority is for everyone in the raid to do their best to avoid aggroing additional mobs. This is an immediately urgent and ongoing priority.
Because the Plane of Hate is considered an outdoor zone, most of the walls of buildings around you are ignored for the purposes of blocking line of sight. This means that patrolling mobs out in the streets, mobs in adjacent buildings, and even mobs up on the second floor (!!!) have the possibility of aggroing anyone in the raid! Therefore, many confusingly terrible things can happen to cause unintended aggro. Here's a list of some of those terrible things, but it's probably not exhaustive:
- Someone sits.
- Someone gets lost.
- Someone is a low level character or has a low level pet (most pets are low level)
- A loathing lich or some other Wizard mob casts Gravity Flux, throwing characters up to the ceiling
- An ashenbone drake knocks back the tank over a ramp of some sort, getting him close enough to the ceiling
- Someone runs up the slanted zone wall, getting themselves too close to the ceiling
- Someone jumps a little too high
- Someone says out loud. "Boy, it's kind of quiet tonight, isn't it?"
If the consequences are not obvious, getting too close to the ceiling might aggro a second floor mob. If you're lucky, that second floor mob will kill the perpetrator through the floor (as NPC melee range seems to have infinite vertical range). If the perpetrator moves or if additional second floor mobs aggro, and you're super lucky, they might all warp through the floor and appear on top of your raid. But what usually happens is the aggroing mob or anything that socialed on him will take a long, winding path to the staircase in the center of the zone, descend, then path to your raid, thereby creating a (literally) unholy and massive train the likes of which have been seen far too many times.
The best thing you can do to mitigate this risk is to have a Necromancer cast Dead Man Floating on the entire raid. Any form of Levitate will negate the throw-up component of Gravity Flux. Hold raid members accountable for checking that they are always levitated in some form, and have one or more raid officers monitor all members to call out people who aren't floating. The second best thing you can do is make sure that all members understand that they should remain on the floor at all times, and that they should never ascend ramps, climb on furniture, or get on top of other objects like the fountain. Staying low is the way to go (tm).
Some cautious raid leaders may disallow pets until the raid moves to the second floor. This is generally recommended, although if pets are levitated and over level 45 or so, it's an acceptable risk if you trust your pet wielding members to be alert. Charmed pets are especially valuable for their incredible dps.
Pullers may find it unavoidable to get some second floor aggro while pulling. Some monsters reside in the second floor of various buildings, on the second floor of Maestro's hall, or on the second floor of the church. Any mob not on the ground should be considered to have a chance to cause second floor aggro. Have a second Monk screen or peel from every pull to mitigate train risk. If you do get second floor aggro, go ahead and /quit after flopping and log back in. It often takes so long for mobs to path back up there that it isn't worth the wait for them to reset. This is a good zone for building a healthy affinity for /quit as a puller. It always takes less time to log in again than to train, wipe, and CR in Plane of Hate.
The priorities for pullers should first be the pathers on the nearby route labeled "South Patrol Route" on the map below in green. Secondly, start working the adjacent buildings. Many of the buildings nearby have a second floor inside them (these little second floors are distinct from the second floor of the whole zone). You may want to check all of these but be careful and look for second floor (of the zone) aggro messages. Common second floor mobs include stuff like an ashenbone drake, A Disciple of Innoruuk, A Champion of Innoruuk, An Agent of Innoruuk, etc.. a haunted chests will tend to spawn up in these buildings' second floors. Don't forget that they will lack a nameplate and have a smaller aggro radius than most other mobs.
Once you've cleared the adjacent buildings, it's time to clear a path to the second camp location. I generally recommend the area between the fountain and the staircase. You'll want to clear out the other patrol routes near the fountain, and perhaps some of the mobs in the east end of the church. The church is a larger building west of the zone-in. It also has two floors and can cause a respectable train if aggroed while your raid moves to the fountain. You'll also want to pull a few of the mobs at the top of the staircase, so that they don't aggro your group at the fountain unexpectedly. Usually this pull will include several drakes, which you might want to split up first (though this is difficult).
Once your raid has moved to the fountain and many of the mobs near the top of the staircase have been cleared out, your risk of training yourselves is significantly decreased and the pace and urgency of your raid can be relaxed considerably. Be mindful that pathing mobs can respawn faster than the statics, and that you have two routes nearby (though if your raid has no lower levels, they might never aggro). The fountain, unlike other objects, does seem to block line of sight. Encourage your members to stand close to it, but not directly on it, especially if the second floor is still teeming with dangerous mobs. From here you can clear out the Maestro hall or other first floor areas, or continue clearing the second floor. It all depends on what mini-bosses are up, where they're located, and what your guild's leadership wants to get first.
If you want to move up to the second floor next, you should focus first on clearing out the buildings near the staircase, pulling the mobs down to the first floor to be killed near the fountain or at the zone-in. Monks can use Stalking Probes, Holgresh Elder Beads, or simply sit to get aggro on nearby mobs through the walls. Unlike the first floor, mobs on the second floor tend not to path around but just run straight through the walls. Once the immediate area around the stairwell seems safe, go into building #4 (on the map above) and clear it out too. Once it's clear, sit all along the north wall to get any other mobs nearby, then move your raid into building #4 and have them set up along that north wall. This is generally the safest spot on the second floor.
Unlike the first floor, running around on the second floor will generally not aggro mobs on the other floor. This probably because first floor mobs are lower level and because you already cleared most of them. You don't need to keep levitate on everyone anymore, and it's probably cool to summon pets, even lower level ones.
Monks should be able to pull the whole second floor to building #4. Some dangers to watch out for are imp traps and the an Evangelist of Hate's building.
Imp traps will spawn a number of evil little imps which will tear you to shreds like those Compsognathuses in Jurassic Park 2. Even worse, when you flop, they tend to never reset. This forces you to bring the whole lot of them to camp or /q them off. They're not particularly hard mobs, but their tiny size and affinity for swarming healers makes them a pain. Skilled enchanters should use tab targeting and AoE stuns to get them under control. Try not to pull anything else along with an imp swarm. Imps will despawn after a short while if they don't have aggro.
The an Evangelist of Hate is probably the most hated mob in the zone (sorry). His proselytizations cause many (all?) other second floor dark elf mobs to spam the zone with an annoying series of shouts. This spam is so intense that it causes client-side lag and even disconnects. As such, many raids consider this mob a special target, even if it has a lackluster loot table. Approach his building especially carefully, because he is surrounded by over a dozen other second floor mobs which will need to be split off. As you know by now, many second floor mobs are casters, making this one of the most challenging split pulls in the game.
ONE WEIRD TRICK TO EASILY PULL THE EVANGELIST OF HATE BUILDING. INNORUUK HATES THIS -- Bring a rogue and a druid/ranger with you to the house, then have the druid/ranger target the rogue and use them as a precision harmony strike. The rogue can position themselves in the building to pick and choose exactly which mobs get hit with the aoe harmony and which mobs are untouched, making it very easy for your pullers to pull 2-4 mobs at a time instead of 12-16.
Conquering the Plane of Hate is one of the first milestones of an effective raid leadership. Even if you don't clear the entire zone, simply breaking in to Hate and snagging a few minis is a significant accomplishment for a new guild. Congratulate your members if you succeed, or mourn them if you fail. The burning sting of hell and the teamwork you foster to overcome it will be something you remember for an eternity.
References
