Gyllenhaal was a near necessity for some strategies. (Destiny)

by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Friday, March 25, 2016, 03:18 (3259 days ago) @ Ragashingo

To be clear, I wasn't really referring to Skolas. The only time any of my groups ever attempted the Gjallarhorn method on him, it didn't go well. I was thinking more of Kaliks and the big knight.

...

Funny story, though: The first time I ran Skolas I actually did the whole fight a level below max, so I was double-underleveled. Only, I didn't know it while it was happening...

On my group's first attempt, we experimented with some new method that had recently become known. What that method was, I don't remember, but it didn't go well. So much so that we immediately abandoned it and wiped to start the round over, deciding to go by the book the next time.

While sitting in the airlock before making our second attempt, we were waiting for our supers to be ready before going in. Someone in the group suggested that we all equip our highest-intellect gear to get ready faster, and... I think you can see where this is going. My highest-intellect gear put me back a level, and I forgot to switch it back before going in.

Now, throughout the whole fight I felt like I was dying VERY quickly. I mean, it was to the point that if I started getting hit and was NOT expecting it beforehand, I usually didn't have time to react before I was dead. I felt like I'd only survive attacks if I saw them coming and started moving out of the way ahead of time. One direct hit from Skolas would often kill me outright. Being a Sunsinger helped a little but that only saves you once every few minutes, you know? I said something about how insane the difficulty seemed the first few times, but after a while it was happening so often that I felt like a broken record, and I know I have a tendency to complain pretty vocally anyway, so I just shut up to avoid my teammates hating me. Plus they weren't dying nearly as much, so I thought maybe I was just really bad at this fight. And on top of all that. I KNEW we were SUPPOSED to be underleveled, so it made sense to me that I was dying more quickly than normal. I had sort of been expecting it to be hard, so it just didn't occur to me that something was actually wrong, you know?

Of course, after it was all over I realized what had been going on. I was a little annoyed, but mostly just proud that we'd gotten the mechanics down so well that we were able to get through on only our second try, despite my character being made of tissue paper.