Man, this encounter was so much fun, both mechanically, the level of difficulty, and also aesthetically pleasing.

I think for ours we generally had three shooters, one for each element, then more or less freelanced cooking the craniums. Shooters could grab a different element if needed and things like cooking shooting could shift a little as needed if we suddenly had to deal with three of the same color crystals appearing or something.

Really, the most important thing is to have everybody try and stay aware of what elements are needed and redirect people to the appropriate cooking station on the fly. We found that not speaking up caused a lot more harm than calling out the wrong thing because even if you were wrong you would almost always be corrected where as not saying anything could lead to a skull getting deposited in the wrong spot with no real way to recover.

We beat this encounter pretty easily on our second Raid Lair run... Though that probably has more to do with what the next encounter requires.

We did it with Defenders and runners. 3 pairs of one runner and one defender.

Defenders guard the charging pads, and the runners grab and place the craniums.

Defender calls out the colors as the mines appear, and the runners each call responsibility for one to charge, or they tell their paired defender to get it. We only charged what needed to be charged. If no craniums were charging and there were no mines on your side as a defender, you’d wander over and help others.

So if 2 solars and a void come up on the void side, the void defender would call that out. The three runners would each claim an element, then get a cranium and charge it, or tell their defender to do it if positioning is better. Then they stay with their cranium and shoot the corresponding mine. In this situation, the arc defender would leave and help out since there’s nothing happening on their platform this round.

The key for us was to be flexible, yet return to this basic setup after curveballs.

And yeah. This encounter kicked ass. Challenging, yet a lot of room for flexibility and recoverability.

I’m fascinated to see you say that you can kill two minds with a single cranium. Based on our testing it seems like it was an open question whether they even had 150 percent of the damage needed.

Then again, I thought there were only five craniums not six so who knows?

I have to believe someone who is working on this Raid encounter is someone who has worked in a professional kitchen before. Doing it is so reminiscent of trying to combine elements from different stations so that things come out in the right order despite different cook times (based on how far they need to run around). And the orders come in at their pace, not yours. Ultimately it all depends on communication and most failures can be tracked back to someone who stoped talking.

I kept having to stop myself from slipping in the kitchen lingo. Fire one arc; Three void, all day.

Last time I ran it, there was an excessive number of Void crystal. Seriously, There was always at least 2 Void crystals active at any time (no, not each spawn, active). We had planned to keep one of each cooking at all times, but this Void Mania threw a wrench into our plan. We just winged it as we went.

Communication is a LOT more important than plans on this part, it seems.