Stealth Striking Cosmics

arimikami · November 2017

For about a week or so, I've seen cosmics turning from the tank to attack the DPSers without warning. The only commonality I've been able to find with each time this has happened is that the cosmic targets a specific player that uses the Night Warrior passive.

I don't have specific numbers since I don't have that power on any of my characters, but I'm guessing that a geared out level 40 character probably does around 20k base damage with Stealth Strike, if not more. Once you factor in crits and even just a single stack of focus, you're looking at anywhere from 30-40k damage and that's without buffs from support toons. Someone doing this every time Stealth Strike comes off of cooldown is going to generate more hate than a tank can hold agro against, and I think that's what's happening.

I'm posting this in the hopes that a tank and someone with a stealth character are willing to test this so we can verify that this is what's happening and tell stealth users to make sure to take a threat wipe to use between stealth strikes so they don't get the rest of the DPSers killed

pantagruel01 · November 2017

Is it always the same player who's using night warrior? Shadow Strike has a significant cooldown and doesn't scale strongly with buffs, and it's common to generate the required stealth with a threat wipe (which will certainly prevent unwanted turning), so it's not likely shadow strike per se to blame -- just high general dps, possibly combined with something dumb/malicious like using defender gloves.

arimikami · November 2017

There's been about a half dozen times or so in the last 4-5 days where I've been at a cosmic and it turns around while the tank is still up and going to attack the DPSers, and it targetted the same character each time this happened.

I don't think stealth strike is the only power they're using, but I do think it's a significant contributor to what I've been seeing happening. Each time it's happened, it's been pretty early on in the fight. For example, it happened today at dino right at the first damage check, and didn't happen again for the rest of the fight. I think it's a result of very high spike damage early in the fight rather than a sustained DPS.

chaosdrgnz43 · November 2017

And that is why Threat wipe powers were made. But dps hardly pick any because they like to deal more dmg. Dps who do this should be aware that they have to go to tank side when they get the aggro. Or just die to remove their aggro.

Also, from what you described, it seems like this person uses the Mindwipe+Shadow Strike+Dragon atk spam combo. It's one of the most common burst move when using Night Warrior. Even higher when Vorpal blade+Reaper's Embrace is added to the mix.

shredmonkey · November 2017

Stealth strike does not crit... So 18-25k is more likely vs a cosmic boss. Also, with recent changes it is actually difficult to re-enter stealth mid fight, so it is much less common to use other than as an opener. Also, the most common way to re-enter stealth includes a threat wipe, so that further refutes the stealth strike theory.

However, Night Warrior does reduce charge time and allows part of your damage to ignore defenses, so it is used my a lot of ultra high DPS builds for those reasons. You are correct that the DPS is generating more threat then the tank in the cases you are seeing and Night Warrior is often on the top DPS build.

My personal opinion is that this is always the fault of the DPS for not taking measures to reduce thier threat. A threat wipe helps the most but just letting the tank build up some agro at the start if the fight is easy and doesn't take a power choice. (And yes, I am guilty of taking threat from tanks myself and I have threat wipes on my DPS toons so shame on me.)

But also know that a high threat tank will hold agro over the highest DPS in this game everytime, so a maxed cosmic tank makes the DPS's job easy. In my opinion, DPSers should know thier tanks and adjust thier play accordingly.

That said, death, is a form of threat wipe.

Stealth Striking Cosmics

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