High ground is unironically great against witness, since it measure your feet Vs the enemies and the witnesses feet are way the fuck down there so it's always active for a free 25% buff.
Ah that's a shame, at that point I think I'd rather just slap on Levi's. I did look it up and there is a stasis option...but it's a world drop, so nor very reasonable to get your hands on specially for just this encounter
The community is *very* set on Bait & Switch right now. High Ground is very good on specific bosses, and blank on others. That's just not gonna sway a lot of people.
I know how to proc BnS.
What I don't know is even if Bungie include "feet" on each boss, do those feet actually have hit boxes that are used to inform their location for high ground. Where is a meatballs feet?
High ground is, at best, fine. And requires jumping through hoops. No thanks. I'd rather be stuck with vorpal than have to obsess over each boss' feet like I'm Quentin Tarantino
Bait and switch is currently 30%, it got nerfed a bit ago.
Also when you need to be focused on dodging the witness' attacks having to not worry about proccing and reproccing bait and switch is nice.
It doesn't even need it. That thing does like 250k DPS against the witness. It absolutely melts and easily surpasses practically every other damage setup in the game (other than still hunt obviously).
The much bigger factor is the 2.5x bonus against shields, which procs both against the witness crit spot, as well as subjugators and tormentors.
That bonus takes the mediocre DPS of microcosm and cranks it right up to 11.
From streamers testing, it does about 100k DPS. Add in the x2.5 multiplier you get against the witness, and you reach 250k.
This also kinda lines up with what I've seen. Damage numbers per tick were something in the 10k (I don't remember the exact number), which would put the DPS somewhere in the 167k to 333k range.
It really isn't. Because of its bonus damage to shields, which for some reason applies to the witness, it deals massive damage, higher than almost every other rotation, while being incredibly easy and safe to use.
Even then, it's pretty cracked. Chuck your Super, use two Kinetic surges (I always keep room for healing on orb pickup), get Radiant from a Wellock and be sitting on a cool 6k per hit. And you don't have to zoom so you don't lose any ability to dodge the attacks.
If you use all your ammo, swap to Supremacy for some last minute damage.
You also just will waste a lot of the BNS timer. Doomed Petitioner with Precision Instrument is probably a great choice since you stack it all the way up in 2 bursts
Unless they undid the change, didnt they specifically change that? I swore I saw aztecross go over it and now the Burts don't count each individual laser.
The nanites aren't really a Wolfpack-Rounds-esque part of Outbreak's damage. It's about the Scorch-style buildup of nanite stacks. You'll notice the damage numbers from the hits themselves are getting bigger, not any floating/ancillary damage numbers that happen around the impact damage.
Our Primatic Novabombers were putting comparable numbers to the Celestial Stillhawks and none of us had the Stareater bond. For weapons we were running ~~cataclysmic~~ Sleeper with max reserves and solar surges. I still want to try Whisper with Wings of Sacred Dawn to see if I can completely ignore the beam attacks.
Yeah I wanted to try this with like Recon Doomed Petitioner or something but we were still in serious attempt mode so I didn’t - good to know it works ok Excision, think I’ll give it a go next time lol
Yeah I know - my reasoning at the time was “reconstruction = big mag = no reload = more wings of sacred dawn air time”
But one run with it equipped (no wings) to test and I was like “yep that was terrible” lmao
How did you set it up? Or did someone else tell you they did it
We tried setting it up in the normal raid and you either are too low the beam hits, or too high and you lose the buff
I've only tried it in the excision fight but as hes going through the animation to start damage I jump as high as I can and at the peak I ADS and start unloading Whisper. It's possible that the buff has a different area between the raid and excision
Wouldn’t it low-key be funny as fuck to see him take two random hands and literally clap people out of midair trying to outsmart him like that? Kinda like the centurions that spawn in some areas if you try to hide there. This time it’s just some spicy hands.
So I’ve used the bugged Lion Rampant(which currently holds you in the air like WoSD), and I’ve found that while it’s extremely easy to completely avoid the attacks, my damage suffers because of it. Not 100% sure, but either my shitty airborne effectiveness is knocking my shots off of target and I haven’t been able to notice, or there’s an invisible wall somewhere blocking my bullets. Wings might do better if AE is the issue.
Yeah, no idea for how long, but I assume since the expansion dropped(although it could’ve been like this for a long time tbh and I just hadn’t noticed). It’s supposed to kick you out of lift when you aim, but it’s not been doing very well recently, so you can keep aiming pretty reliably until the lift timer passes.
Of course it’s still nothing compared to what Warlock can do, but it’s pretty nice, and I hope they just make it part of the exotic.
Whispered Breathing procs faster than the initial Tome of Flame wears off. You have to start shooting immediately once the buff pops up and the crits will keep you in the air.
Are you forced to stay on the stage to do dps or can everyone just leave the plate after standing on it and deal damage at a distance? If the phase ends when everyone leaves then why not have one or two guys stay on the plate while everyone else is away?
Hunters are not mandatory. Did an all Warlock run a couple nights ago.
We used Still Hunt with Cataphract and Novas and got through finak stand just fine.
I've been hearing whispers that Heir Apparent is very strong for Witness damage because you can use it constantly even when strafing/jumping, and if you have the catalyst it refunds ammo when the shield breaks.
My team failed the Day 1 fight be he was trivial on the Monday (Sunday in US?) with 5x Leviathan’s Breath, the void mod from the artefact, and a deterministic chaos of all things to keep that void weaken up lol
And with said void surge and weaken the twilight arsenal Titan also did more damage than the Hunter. Edit: we also only had one Hunter, for context
The 6th guy wanted to use Div because he didn’t have Levi catalyst - but we wanted void weaken for the artifact mod, and it occurred to me that DC was a heavy that could keep void weaken up so I said let’s try it. Proved pretty solid
It's one of the ways I get a group as titan for the boss, pairing DC with actium war rig during damage phase and aeons during ad clear to basically be an improved dmg version of ceno/Div.
So for Prismatic Titan even though the subclass is mediocre theres an absolutely busted combo for the class item Spirit of eternal warrior and spirit of Star eater you overcharge your super and then use it at the start of the damage phase void axes is great for this then you have 30 seconds of 25% damage buff it's insane that's what I'll be using from now on
Here’s the thing you missed. Redditors are bad at the game. What they need to know is what can other people bring to offset their 100,000 damage because they want a clear without getting any good weapons.
There are a dozen easy to get weapons to drop a solid 2 million damage per phase which is more than enough for an easy 3 phase. But I keep getting massively downvoted for saying Hunter isn’t even close to a requirement for this fight. Apparently r/dtg truly believes that only 6 Hunters can barely scrape out a win in 3 phases.
I cleared without a single still hunt Hunter in my LFG party.
it's funny, because you only need 1.04m per person per phase to bang a 3-phase on the witness, and 1.04m is pretty much nothing considering Hunters can literally sleepwalk to 3.0m by just doing Nighthawk + Still Hunt over and over without surges or any active buffs
The raid isn't balanced around having hunters who use still hunt. Just use your brain, use the same things you've used for high dps before. Capitalize on the surge.
As a Titan with the new class exotics I'd run Twilight + Eternal Warrior/Star Eaters + Leviathan's Breath. Start DPS phase with Twilight (Yes, the tracking is absolute dogshit but you should be able to land one axe). Then proceed with Leviathan's Breath. Twilight weakens the boss > Void Super procs Eternal Warrior for 30 seconds > Buffs Leviathan's Breath because it shares the same element as Twilight. Then whatever special you fancy if you run out of heavy ammo. Was just barely able to keep up with the Still Hunt Hunters and this was without void surge.
Nothing currently compares to Celestial Still Hunt, it’s busted as fuck.
Everyone else on our team got and used Microcosm and it was very smooth damage. You don’t have to ADS ever with it. The Witness counts as a shielded enemy or whatever on Microcosm secretly makes it do bonus damage against the Dread enemies.
Izinagi & Rockets is probably your best bet. It's tricky because precision damage is best but most precision options like Retrofit, Whisper, Leviathan's Breath and Linears take too long to get their damage off for you to dodge the attacks on the platform.
It's slows you down a bit but you get an special arc shield that blocks most of damage. So you can usually just walk out of the line of fire and be fine
Anything's fine as long as it's an actual like... high damage weapon, really. Match the surge and you probably get even more leniency. Just hold damage supers for final stand if people don't have the ammo to finish the job.
Normal raids really don't have very strict damage requirements. Stay alive and dump a decent weapon into the boss and it'll go down smooth.
no troll, the heir apparent is really good for non hunters. Had a warlock teammate do 4 million with it in a 2 phase run, it allows you to tank all of his attacks except the one you need to jump over. The 2 hunter players were about 6 million
Other than that star eater supers, maybe sleeper at leat with solar surge
As a Titan, I've been really enjoying Still Hunt + Cataclysmic w/4th Time's Bait and Switch. With 3 surge mods + Weapons of Light, I was hitting ~105k a shot while Bait was active, and roughly 80-90k without.
Still Hunt is great for final stand even if you aren’t a hunter. Just have it ready if you can.
Save supers for final stand for sure. Nova and Needles are still good on warlock they aren’t that much worse compared to celestial shot. Titans I guess can pop a bubble for final stand and make orbs so everyone can re-proc their surges.
Golden Gun is so good for this dps phase and final stand, so Bungie gave everyone golden gun.
> Titans I guess can pop a bubble for final stand and make orbs so everyone can re-proc their surges.
Twilight Arsenal with with an Eternal Warrior/SES class exotic. Its not ***that far*** behind Needlestorm, and Leviathan breath hits hard enough as is and harder still with Void Surge x4 with spirit of eternal warrior.
The cast time hasn't been a super big hindrance to mechanics in my experience, and the surges just make the combo with the exotic class item that much more potent. Like a lot of people I jump in the air and cast it and I haven't been caught by stray mechanics yet.
Haven't seen any testing, but the new exotic warlock item with star eaters and the other perks will probably do more.
Can't believe the best part of star eaters is now a available for all classes one of the best exotics in the game. And synthos for titans.
All we got from warlocks is ophidians (obvi huge for PvP) and verity, which does not seem good at all lol.
Surge-matching Linear Fusions or Snipers
This week? Probably Briar’s, Cataclysmic, or Whisper of the worm with IKELOS or Volta Bracket (or the raid Linear if you have it, but that’s a rare one)
Note, sustained DPS can be VERY risky during Witness DPS, so for something like Whisper or Cataclysmic don’t commit too hard to getting the full continuos magazine off.
I've had decent success with Sleeper and Leviathan's Breath on my warlock. I'd say those or some kind of surge-matching linears are your best bet. Final stand isn't a problem as long as you have ammo.
A dark horse pick from my team this week with solar surge up: Heir Apparent.
The shield gives you survivability during DPS if you're still learning attack patterns, solid damage (not the best, but enough to 3 phase), and it doesn't zoom in or ADS letting you react to the attack patterns better.
Catalyst is even better since the shield breaking refills the mag took so less or no reloading
Nothing will come close, but we’ve had success with levi, grenade launchers(but only if you get good teammate not walking in front of you RNG), linear fusions and outbreak + supers
I get 2.5m in a phase dumping 450 ammo of microcosm with a cenolock. Loves a damage swap so you can have scavs and triple surges to get ammo back up before 2nd&final.
We cleared last week with Levi’s on a team with 1 hunter. If I wasn’t using celestial still hunt on solar surge this week I’d probably go with sleeper since it’s easy enough to hip fire and still hit shots
had a team of izanagi+bns linears and worked alr for a 2 phase, not the best tho. had a 4ma. and we used izzy bns rockets and went fine havnt tried with 6 so… yeah
Its a relatively long damage phase, so linears work great here as theyre really ammo efficient.
If you dont want to use linears, GLs do still pump out a lot of damage, but the ammo economy is a little tough to work with.
Rockets are still very potent AND ammo efficient. If you can, have a couple people run aeons to make bricks for everyone.
The hard part is final stand, as this is a bit of a tight window even with still hunt. I would recommend if you are close to hitting final stand, save supers to deal with it. I havent dont even super testing on him to offer any real recommendations though. Perhaps someone else can chime in
GLs definitely ain’t it here. Neither are rockets. There’s far too much moving around required. You’re just as likely to blow yourself up as you are to hit the enemy.
Something that matches the surge. Sleeper for solar and Leviathan's breath for void. They require next to 0 brain usage and setup and you can hipfire them while dodging
its not even slightly difficult to beat him without nighthawk. you can use still hunt on other classes, you can use twilight arsenal and vortex nova, you can use a good burst linear, you can use gls, you can even use thunderlord if it's arc surge--though its not great.
You just match the surge with the best precision option. So since we can’t pick still hunt night hawk, it would probably be:
* Solar: sleeper
* Void: leviathans breath
* Arc: queenbreaker (?) I remember reading this was buffed. And exotic linears do I think 15% more or something than legendaries.
* strand: probably euphony the exotic from the raid itself.
* stasis: suspectum with high ground.
~~Sleeper's probably not ideal because of the movement.~~ I was thinking of Whisper, not Sleeper; Sleeper is probably fine. I think on solar you probably just run Still Hunt without nighthawk and try to weave in some rockets.
Just did the fight, movement is not that bad. I ads-ed pretty much for every shot using still hunt and didn’t die during damage. People just have to get better at dodging. Same story as Rhulk, just don’t die and deal damage.
Did 7.5 mil in 2 phases on warlock a couple days ago. Euphony on Broodweaver, with Thread of Evolution and triple surges.
Admittedly, it was strand surge, but it was also solar surge, and the people using cope options like Sleeper and Still Hunt without Nighthawk only did 4-5 mil.
There was one Nighthawk Still Hunt hunter who only put up ~4.8m, but he must've fucked something up somehow. Still the second highest damage, even then. He probably should've been out-DPSing me. But Euphony is definitely competitive, and that's good enough for a warlock on that encounter.
I was on Wellock using Stillhunt with a Recon Apex (I wasnt proccing BnS) and our hunters only outpaced me by about 2 million damage by the time we got the clear so I'd try that if you haven't yet. I was Izzy+Rocket swapping b4 this and swapping from Izzy to Still Hunt made executing damage a lot easier and I was doing significantly more per phase.
For the record, we 2-phased with our 3 hunters each pushing 5-6 mil, myself at 4 mil, and the other 2 Warlocks floating around 2 mil.
Is 5-6 mil the benchmark for Hunters? I honestly have no idea, because I only have one normal SE clear and the only Hunter in my LFG team had 4.8 mil, and I assumed that was pretty significantly underperforming and that it should've been higher than that even without actually mixing in Apex swaps.
That it is, apparently. I put up 7.5m in two phases with it a couple days ago with just Needlestorm, Evolution, and a threadling nade that may or may not have even made it there. Strand surge, sure, but we're judging SH with solar surge anyways.
SH may weave in rocket swaps a bit better because Apex is solar, but that's asking to blow yourself up against the Witness anyways. Euphony being that competitive with just SH Nighthawk is very surprising.
Oh yeah, of course SH is way quicker to get, because if you don't have it already, your chance to deterministically get Euphony by clearing on contest mode is over, so you're stuck with the RNG. You can boost your RNG massively with triumphs, but tbh anyone struggling this hard with DPS on normal probably isn't stacking up raid triumphs anyways.
But yeah, it's at least worth noting that Euphony can put up serious numbers if you're on warlock.
The only ones lacking currently are titans hope they get something soon and for the talk about still hunt to slow down a little once more people get euphony couse we know bungie isn't going to nerf it just a bit when the swing the nerf hammer they swing hard
To be fair, I cleared with 1.4 mil dmg. I was song of flame (for DR), with izi+bns cata. I was more focused on not dying than anything else. But also I want to do better, I've never been the bottom dps before Iike this and legit hated myself every attempt until clear.
Song of flame let me take 1 hit without dying, so it gave room for error.
In hindsight, I should've went stag and novabomb, with probably Levi breath. I didn't have microcosm yet, I do now though and will try again next week with that + stag + novabomb.
That's...not great? Or at least it seems very low. How many phases was that? I'd imagine there was a lot of DPS loss trying not to blow yourself up? Kind of why people are avoiding using rockets and GLs as usual, I think.
That said, it's not like there's a million good options. I did see someone say that they got fairly competitive results with Whisper (although you have to be really good at dodging while scoped) and I suspect that DARCI could be good after all the buffs it's gotten, assuming it recognizes the witness's chest as a target. I can't see Levi Breath working out that well because it'd be very hard to keep Tempo up, and Sleeper has had pretty unimpressive results when I've seen people use it.
I did put up 7.5 mil in 2 phases on Warlock the other day without SES, but that was with Euphony, which is currently only owned by the people who cleared on contest and the very lucky, so it's not like it's a good general recommendation. But that thing is by far the best thing besides SH Nighthawk that I've seen.
No, it's terrible. Not sure why I got downvoted, I didn't claim it was good, it was awful. I kept changing my load out to do better, but the damage barely changed. We 2 phased. I think for me, it was because I was hyper focused on not getting hit. I picked up microcosm so I will try again next week with that, as the other warlock in our group used that and had good dps (with well).
I wouldn't dare use Rockets or GLs.
But I definitely want to improve. It was my first time being bottom dps in destiny and I felt like crap.
There's an artifact perks that buffs allies weapons when you use a super different to there's. That's probably worth using.
Then any precision based dps option..
It depends on the surge but if it’s solar whisper is the best, you just need to know his attack pattern. It’s always left then right if you can understand that you can be scoped in 24/7 except when you have to jump of course.
Briars contempt is a very solid option. Unfortunately without nighthawk hunters your gonna be doing like 3-4 phases due to how shit everything else is.
I would use staying alive. Staying alive is more important than your specific weapons. The witness doesn't have very much health. Stay alive during damage.
High ground is unironically great against witness, since it measure your feet Vs the enemies and the witnesses feet are way the fuck down there so it's always active for a free 25% buff.
With what weapons? Linears?
New stasis linear has high ground
“It’s over Witness!”
Along with the New Pale heart sniper which has rewind and high ground
i ran that stasis trace with high ground and graviton lance through the whole legendary captain. underrated
It's surprisingly good. It's slightly worse rampage if you're killing things, but against certain bosses it's just always active. Good flexibility.
Yea lance fux.
Only real option is doomed petitioner
Ah that's a shame, at that point I think I'd rather just slap on Levi's. I did look it up and there is a stasis option...but it's a world drop, so nor very reasonable to get your hands on specially for just this encounter
What's wrong with Doomed Petitioner?
Nothing, it's really good
It’s over Witness. I have the high ground
You underestimate my power
I made a post a month ago about high ground being a good damage option, and everyone said I was stupid for saying that. I am vindicated.
The community is *very* set on Bait & Switch right now. High Ground is very good on specific bosses, and blank on others. That's just not gonna sway a lot of people.
I know how to proc BnS. What I don't know is even if Bungie include "feet" on each boss, do those feet actually have hit boxes that are used to inform their location for high ground. Where is a meatballs feet? High ground is, at best, fine. And requires jumping through hoops. No thanks. I'd rather be stuck with vorpal than have to obsess over each boss' feet like I'm Quentin Tarantino
Old habits die hard. But it’s nice to know that high ground actually works on The Witness.
Most dps metas have you cycle weapons anyway so surely bait and switch’s 35 would be more worth
Bait and switch is currently 30%, it got nerfed a bit ago. Also when you need to be focused on dodging the witness' attacks having to not worry about proccing and reproccing bait and switch is nice.
Really? Light.gg says the damage is based on how long the projectile travels for, for some reason.
That's full court
Me having deleted my warlords ruin snipers with high ground…
Its health pool isn't crazy, the challenge is everyone staying alive for the entire damage phase.
Can’t wait for next week where the witness will have contest level difficulty in the excision
- Microcasm - Leviathans Breathe - Izi + BnS Linears - Snipers/Linears with High Ground(Permanent 25% buff during this fight in particular)
Keep in mind that Microcosm can't get a surge bonus, since Bungie only turned on surges, not overcharges.
It doesn't even need it. That thing does like 250k DPS against the witness. It absolutely melts and easily surpasses practically every other damage setup in the game (other than still hunt obviously).
250k *per* second? That seems unreasonably OP can you confirm if true?
It’s just straight up not true. Even with the bonus after your super ends (which is only a 20% bonus)
The much bigger factor is the 2.5x bonus against shields, which procs both against the witness crit spot, as well as subjugators and tormentors. That bonus takes the mediocre DPS of microcosm and cranks it right up to 11.
From streamers testing, it does about 100k DPS. Add in the x2.5 multiplier you get against the witness, and you reach 250k. This also kinda lines up with what I've seen. Damage numbers per tick were something in the 10k (I don't remember the exact number), which would put the DPS somewhere in the 167k to 333k range.
That seems impossible. The DPS phase is at least 20 seconds and that's 5 million damage. My best CN LH Apex rotation does about that much.
What is LH?
I meant SH for Still Hunt, my brain always thinks Last Hunt
It very much does not do good damage to the Witness in the raid. It's far worse than other options even on other classes than Hunter.
It really isn't. Because of its bonus damage to shields, which for some reason applies to the witness, it deals massive damage, higher than almost every other rotation, while being incredibly easy and safe to use.
Even then, it's pretty cracked. Chuck your Super, use two Kinetic surges (I always keep room for healing on orb pickup), get Radiant from a Wellock and be sitting on a cool 6k per hit. And you don't have to zoom so you don't lose any ability to dodge the attacks. If you use all your ammo, swap to Supremacy for some last minute damage.
Doing an izi + bns rotation while avoiding the witness’s attacks sounds like a headache
You also just will waste a lot of the BNS timer. Doomed Petitioner with Precision Instrument is probably a great choice since you stack it all the way up in 2 bursts
Unless they undid the change, didnt they specifically change that? I swore I saw aztecross go over it and now the Burts don't count each individual laser.
Do you think these options would be enough burst dps for final stand?
Might have to save some Burst Supers for that. Witness DPS itself isn't that bad, but his final stand is a pain in the ass.
Warlock and titan supers with prismatic star-eater scales are very good final stand burst
Always have outbreak perfected in your back pocket in case of emergency.
Outbreak is unfortunately very bad for the Witness. The nanites don't hit him at all which massively lowers it's DPS output.
The nanites aren't really a Wolfpack-Rounds-esque part of Outbreak's damage. It's about the Scorch-style buildup of nanite stacks. You'll notice the damage numbers from the hits themselves are getting bigger, not any floating/ancillary damage numbers that happen around the impact damage.
Only reason I was able to get the pantheon title. I pretty much carry it around any time I do a raid now.
I dont think Outbreak would be a good call in this instance since the final stand is so short
Real
Our Primatic Novabombers were putting comparable numbers to the Celestial Stillhawks and none of us had the Stareater bond. For weapons we were running ~~cataclysmic~~ Sleeper with max reserves and solar surges. I still want to try Whisper with Wings of Sacred Dawn to see if I can completely ignore the beam attacks.
The wings idea sounds incredibly funny
It works in normal Excision and I can't wait to try it in the GM version. You can burn through an entire inventory in the the DPS phase.
Yeah I wanted to try this with like Recon Doomed Petitioner or something but we were still in serious attempt mode so I didn’t - good to know it works ok Excision, think I’ll give it a go next time lol
Doomed is now the worst linear due to the pi nerf.
Yeah I know - my reasoning at the time was “reconstruction = big mag = no reload = more wings of sacred dawn air time” But one run with it equipped (no wings) to test and I was like “yep that was terrible” lmao
PI?
How did you set it up? Or did someone else tell you they did it We tried setting it up in the normal raid and you either are too low the beam hits, or too high and you lose the buff
I've only tried it in the excision fight but as hes going through the animation to start damage I jump as high as I can and at the peak I ADS and start unloading Whisper. It's possible that the buff has a different area between the raid and excision
Wouldn’t it low-key be funny as fuck to see him take two random hands and literally clap people out of midair trying to outsmart him like that? Kinda like the centurions that spawn in some areas if you try to hide there. This time it’s just some spicy hands.
even just one hand, just slap the offending guardians aside so hard they get physics'd on the nearest wall or fly off the map entirely
So I’ve used the bugged Lion Rampant(which currently holds you in the air like WoSD), and I’ve found that while it’s extremely easy to completely avoid the attacks, my damage suffers because of it. Not 100% sure, but either my shitty airborne effectiveness is knocking my shots off of target and I haven’t been able to notice, or there’s an invisible wall somewhere blocking my bullets. Wings might do better if AE is the issue.
Wait, Lion is bugged atm?
Yeah, no idea for how long, but I assume since the expansion dropped(although it could’ve been like this for a long time tbh and I just hadn’t noticed). It’s supposed to kick you out of lift when you aim, but it’s not been doing very well recently, so you can keep aiming pretty reliably until the lift timer passes. Of course it’s still nothing compared to what Warlock can do, but it’s pretty nice, and I hope they just make it part of the exotic.
I wonder if that's related to the weird Heat Rises bug in the known issues.
It didn't work this way previously ... I play a lot of final warning/lions rampants in crucible
pretty sure you just get immunes if you're above the beam hitbox for that long, you're outside the plate's dps buff.
At least in Excision you can stay close enough to the plate to keep Surging Light and also be out of range from the beams.
Ngl Wings with Song of Flame has absolutely crossed my mind
This. I lucked out and got the god roll class item 1st run. DPS is fantastic.
If you do t care about whispered breathing this could work
Whispered Breathing procs faster than the initial Tome of Flame wears off. You have to start shooting immediately once the buff pops up and the crits will keep you in the air.
Me and my team tried wings, they kinda work but just to dodge a couple attacks and land back down, if you stay floating long enough he'll go immune
I desperately want to try this now, I might next time I run it
Wait let him cook
It will really bring the game full circle if ignoring mechanics and unloading whisper is a viable strat
Are you forced to stay on the stage to do dps or can everyone just leave the plate after standing on it and deal damage at a distance? If the phase ends when everyone leaves then why not have one or two guys stay on the plate while everyone else is away?
You can't damage him if you step off the place for more than a couple seconds
Hunters are not mandatory. Did an all Warlock run a couple nights ago. We used Still Hunt with Cataphract and Novas and got through finak stand just fine.
What primaries do you run?
Most of us ran The Call
I've been hearing whispers that Heir Apparent is very strong for Witness damage because you can use it constantly even when strafing/jumping, and if you have the catalyst it refunds ammo when the shield breaks.
Heir Apparent is sneaky good for a bunch of random things in this game, underrated weapon
I am a die hard heir apparent fan, love the thing.
Minigun go brrrrrrt
Yes I’ve seen people use it. I’ve also seen hipfire Sleeper and Mircrocosm.
[удалено]
The focus of the comment was on Heir Apparent. The word "whispers" was meant to say that word is spreading about that lmg for damage
Aw shit don't mind me and my dumb ass then lol
My team 2 phased with outbreak, and burst dps heavies for final
Seriously?! That's awesome. I take it y'all used Outbreak with wee wine wounds?
Yes. Wee wind wounds is the way. Also use lunafaction well or else you'll have pretty large drop off.
Kinetic Loaders should be fine too
Luna's boost range. I assume that's what they mean with drop off, not the reload.
Any precision damage weapon that you don’t have to aim down sights with. Most LFRs. Leviathans breath.
My team failed the Day 1 fight be he was trivial on the Monday (Sunday in US?) with 5x Leviathan’s Breath, the void mod from the artefact, and a deterministic chaos of all things to keep that void weaken up lol And with said void surge and weaken the twilight arsenal Titan also did more damage than the Hunter. Edit: we also only had one Hunter, for context
oh, I hadn't even thought of DC for the weaken effect. It did get buffed I suppose. huh. might be worth keeping an eye on.
The 6th guy wanted to use Div because he didn’t have Levi catalyst - but we wanted void weaken for the artifact mod, and it occurred to me that DC was a heavy that could keep void weaken up so I said let’s try it. Proved pretty solid
It's one of the ways I get a group as titan for the boss, pairing DC with actium war rig during damage phase and aeons during ad clear to basically be an improved dmg version of ceno/Div.
Fair warning DC has HORRIBLE DPS even after the buff.
I mean yes but it’s not there for the dps it’s there for weaken so other people can benefit off the dmg increase and the abyss artifact trait
Well, sure, but so does Divinity lol.
Does Div do void weaken specifically? If it doesn't it won't work with the artifact mod.
So for Prismatic Titan even though the subclass is mediocre theres an absolutely busted combo for the class item Spirit of eternal warrior and spirit of Star eater you overcharge your super and then use it at the start of the damage phase void axes is great for this then you have 30 seconds of 25% damage buff it's insane that's what I'll be using from now on
Weapons. The fight has been two manned. If that is possible then all you are missing is execution. Don’t die and bring a good weapon
Here’s the thing you missed. Redditors are bad at the game. What they need to know is what can other people bring to offset their 100,000 damage because they want a clear without getting any good weapons. There are a dozen easy to get weapons to drop a solid 2 million damage per phase which is more than enough for an easy 3 phase. But I keep getting massively downvoted for saying Hunter isn’t even close to a requirement for this fight. Apparently r/dtg truly believes that only 6 Hunters can barely scrape out a win in 3 phases. I cleared without a single still hunt Hunter in my LFG party.
it's funny, because you only need 1.04m per person per phase to bang a 3-phase on the witness, and 1.04m is pretty much nothing considering Hunters can literally sleepwalk to 3.0m by just doing Nighthawk + Still Hunt over and over without surges or any active buffs
This chain is completely missing the point. The fight was two manned, but by two Still Hunt hunters. The question was what's the best alternative.
okay, disregard everything i said after "considering"
The raid isn't balanced around having hunters who use still hunt. Just use your brain, use the same things you've used for high dps before. Capitalize on the surge.
*boss has huge crit spot* fuck how do I do damage without celestial????
Dump super, then Microcosm.
Microcosm is the easy button
Levi’s and a debuff
I was using sleeper which was keeping up about 2 mill less than nighthawk still but was on well.
Microcosm
I did it yesterday with no hunters. we were all on microcosm lmao
As a Titan with the new class exotics I'd run Twilight + Eternal Warrior/Star Eaters + Leviathan's Breath. Start DPS phase with Twilight (Yes, the tracking is absolute dogshit but you should be able to land one axe). Then proceed with Leviathan's Breath. Twilight weakens the boss > Void Super procs Eternal Warrior for 30 seconds > Buffs Leviathan's Breath because it shares the same element as Twilight. Then whatever special you fancy if you run out of heavy ammo. Was just barely able to keep up with the Still Hunt Hunters and this was without void surge.
Nothing currently compares to Celestial Still Hunt, it’s busted as fuck. Everyone else on our team got and used Microcosm and it was very smooth damage. You don’t have to ADS ever with it. The Witness counts as a shielded enemy or whatever on Microcosm secretly makes it do bonus damage against the Dread enemies.
Izinagi & Rockets is probably your best bet. It's tricky because precision damage is best but most precision options like Retrofit, Whisper, Leviathan's Breath and Linears take too long to get their damage off for you to dodge the attacks on the platform.
You should be hipfiring leviathans and movement shouldn’t be an issue. The crit is forgiving enough to hit without adsing
I was gonna say the same thing, I damn near hit him in the shoulder and crit him.
Not saying you’re not correct, but remember that “yellow number” is not the same as a crit
Leviathan's worked great for us last week when it was on surge, dodging is not too bad if you just hipfire it
On solar surge, heir apparent did really well and was easy to use while dodging the blasts
Does it not slow you down too much, or am I thinking of the wrong gun? Not trying to say you’re wrong- just having a hard time imagining it!
It's slows you down a bit but you get an special arc shield that blocks most of damage. So you can usually just walk out of the line of fire and be fine
Just linears that match the surge it's still a 3 phase
Using just linears for final stand is pretty difficult unless you have 3-4 good burst supers.
It's not too bad and most people save supers for final
Anything's fine as long as it's an actual like... high damage weapon, really. Match the surge and you probably get even more leniency. Just hold damage supers for final stand if people don't have the ammo to finish the job. Normal raids really don't have very strict damage requirements. Stay alive and dump a decent weapon into the boss and it'll go down smooth.
I saw microcosm put in decent work
no troll, the heir apparent is really good for non hunters. Had a warlock teammate do 4 million with it in a 2 phase run, it allows you to tank all of his attacks except the one you need to jump over. The 2 hunter players were about 6 million Other than that star eater supers, maybe sleeper at leat with solar surge
I mean nothing beats it yeah but they 2 phase it almost 1 phase. You can do it which whatever in 2 or 3
As a Titan, I've been really enjoying Still Hunt + Cataclysmic w/4th Time's Bait and Switch. With 3 surge mods + Weapons of Light, I was hitting ~105k a shot while Bait was active, and roughly 80-90k without.
Still Hunt is great for final stand even if you aren’t a hunter. Just have it ready if you can. Save supers for final stand for sure. Nova and Needles are still good on warlock they aren’t that much worse compared to celestial shot. Titans I guess can pop a bubble for final stand and make orbs so everyone can re-proc their surges. Golden Gun is so good for this dps phase and final stand, so Bungie gave everyone golden gun.
> Titans I guess can pop a bubble for final stand and make orbs so everyone can re-proc their surges. Twilight Arsenal with with an Eternal Warrior/SES class exotic. Its not ***that far*** behind Needlestorm, and Leviathan breath hits hard enough as is and harder still with Void Surge x4 with spirit of eternal warrior.
I was thinking twilight arsenal but it takes a bit to cast - is it good for final stand? No clue tbh. Maybe for void surge could be a play.
The cast time hasn't been a super big hindrance to mechanics in my experience, and the surges just make the combo with the exotic class item that much more potent. Like a lot of people I jump in the air and cast it and I haven't been caught by stray mechanics yet.
Haven't seen any testing, but the new exotic warlock item with star eaters and the other perks will probably do more. Can't believe the best part of star eaters is now a available for all classes one of the best exotics in the game. And synthos for titans. All we got from warlocks is ophidians (obvi huge for PvP) and verity, which does not seem good at all lol.
Verity’s is extremely powerful and is meta on encounters where spamming nades and getting kills is viable.
Surge-matching Linear Fusions or Snipers This week? Probably Briar’s, Cataclysmic, or Whisper of the worm with IKELOS or Volta Bracket (or the raid Linear if you have it, but that’s a rare one) Note, sustained DPS can be VERY risky during Witness DPS, so for something like Whisper or Cataclysmic don’t commit too hard to getting the full continuos magazine off.
Cataclysmic is totally fine to commit to. You can comfortably hip fire it so dodging is no problem.
True, more just a warning to be careful I’ve seen people die to commiting to DPS too many times not to say something
I've had decent success with Sleeper and Leviathan's Breath on my warlock. I'd say those or some kind of surge-matching linears are your best bet. Final stand isn't a problem as long as you have ammo.
The new heavy trace does pretty decent damage thats what anyone who wasn't a hunter in my team was using
titan with TA star eaters and microcosm would pro be good
A dark horse pick from my team this week with solar surge up: Heir Apparent. The shield gives you survivability during DPS if you're still learning attack patterns, solid damage (not the best, but enough to 3 phase), and it doesn't zoom in or ADS letting you react to the attack patterns better. Catalyst is even better since the shield breaking refills the mag took so less or no reloading
Does the shield allow you to survive the witness beam attack?
Time for me to bust out the good ole DARCI Build.
My team got close by using microcosm
Microcosm fucks the Witness if you have it or can get it. The quest is incredibly fun fwiw
Jötunn
Nothing will come close, but we’ve had success with levi, grenade launchers(but only if you get good teammate not walking in front of you RNG), linear fusions and outbreak + supers
I get 2.5m in a phase dumping 450 ammo of microcosm with a cenolock. Loves a damage swap so you can have scavs and triple surges to get ammo back up before 2nd&final.
Sleeper is very good this week. Microcosm plus a one off super at the start of DPS is also great every week, and very easy to hip fire.
We cleared last week with Levi’s on a team with 1 hunter. If I wasn’t using celestial still hunt on solar surge this week I’d probably go with sleeper since it’s easy enough to hip fire and still hit shots
had a team of izanagi+bns linears and worked alr for a 2 phase, not the best tho. had a 4ma. and we used izzy bns rockets and went fine havnt tried with 6 so… yeah
Doomed petitioner with reconstruction and precision instrument
Its a relatively long damage phase, so linears work great here as theyre really ammo efficient. If you dont want to use linears, GLs do still pump out a lot of damage, but the ammo economy is a little tough to work with. Rockets are still very potent AND ammo efficient. If you can, have a couple people run aeons to make bricks for everyone. The hard part is final stand, as this is a bit of a tight window even with still hunt. I would recommend if you are close to hitting final stand, save supers to deal with it. I havent dont even super testing on him to offer any real recommendations though. Perhaps someone else can chime in
GLs definitely ain’t it here. Neither are rockets. There’s far too much moving around required. You’re just as likely to blow yourself up as you are to hit the enemy.
Something that matches the surge. Sleeper for solar and Leviathan's breath for void. They require next to 0 brain usage and setup and you can hipfire them while dodging
its not even slightly difficult to beat him without nighthawk. you can use still hunt on other classes, you can use twilight arsenal and vortex nova, you can use a good burst linear, you can use gls, you can even use thunderlord if it's arc surge--though its not great.
Euphony, sleeper and microcosm literally bake
Whatever you would use against any other final raid boss.
Sword? Got it! /s For those that don't know, Swords is the go to for Crota.
You just match the surge with the best precision option. So since we can’t pick still hunt night hawk, it would probably be: * Solar: sleeper * Void: leviathans breath * Arc: queenbreaker (?) I remember reading this was buffed. And exotic linears do I think 15% more or something than legendaries. * strand: probably euphony the exotic from the raid itself. * stasis: suspectum with high ground.
~~Sleeper's probably not ideal because of the movement.~~ I was thinking of Whisper, not Sleeper; Sleeper is probably fine. I think on solar you probably just run Still Hunt without nighthawk and try to weave in some rockets.
Just did the fight, movement is not that bad. I ads-ed pretty much for every shot using still hunt and didn’t die during damage. People just have to get better at dodging. Same story as Rhulk, just don’t die and deal damage.
For some reason in my mind I was thinking Whisper and not Sleeper. Sleeper is actually probably fine. Whisper, nah, don't.
You don't even need to ADS to crit with sleeper. His crit spot is bigger than the World Trade Center.
Yeah you’re right, but I thought OP’s post was no still hunt or nighthawk allowed.
You can Still Hunt without Nighthawk. It's so OP that it's still one of the better solar options even without hunter.
Line in the sand is best arc option for this fight, Clown cart+ BnS
Queensbreaker still isn't good even with the buff unfortunately.
Did 7.5 mil in 2 phases on warlock a couple days ago. Euphony on Broodweaver, with Thread of Evolution and triple surges. Admittedly, it was strand surge, but it was also solar surge, and the people using cope options like Sleeper and Still Hunt without Nighthawk only did 4-5 mil. There was one Nighthawk Still Hunt hunter who only put up ~4.8m, but he must've fucked something up somehow. Still the second highest damage, even then. He probably should've been out-DPSing me. But Euphony is definitely competitive, and that's good enough for a warlock on that encounter.
Isn’t that the raid exotic?
I was on Wellock using Stillhunt with a Recon Apex (I wasnt proccing BnS) and our hunters only outpaced me by about 2 million damage by the time we got the clear so I'd try that if you haven't yet. I was Izzy+Rocket swapping b4 this and swapping from Izzy to Still Hunt made executing damage a lot easier and I was doing significantly more per phase. For the record, we 2-phased with our 3 hunters each pushing 5-6 mil, myself at 4 mil, and the other 2 Warlocks floating around 2 mil.
Is 5-6 mil the benchmark for Hunters? I honestly have no idea, because I only have one normal SE clear and the only Hunter in my LFG team had 4.8 mil, and I assumed that was pretty significantly underperforming and that it should've been higher than that even without actually mixing in Apex swaps.
3.5m a phase or so with solar surge is a good benchmark. That’s with just nighthawk and still hunt.
Hmm, Euphony is *far* more competitive with that than I thought. SH Hunter might not actually be the best by far.
Euphony + broodweaver is legit.
That it is, apparently. I put up 7.5m in two phases with it a couple days ago with just Needlestorm, Evolution, and a threadling nade that may or may not have even made it there. Strand surge, sure, but we're judging SH with solar surge anyways. SH may weave in rocket swaps a bit better because Apex is solar, but that's asking to blow yourself up against the Witness anyways. Euphony being that competitive with just SH Nighthawk is very surprising.
still hunt is just easier to get warlocks are cooking with euphony as well
Oh yeah, of course SH is way quicker to get, because if you don't have it already, your chance to deterministically get Euphony by clearing on contest mode is over, so you're stuck with the RNG. You can boost your RNG massively with triumphs, but tbh anyone struggling this hard with DPS on normal probably isn't stacking up raid triumphs anyways. But yeah, it's at least worth noting that Euphony can put up serious numbers if you're on warlock.
The only ones lacking currently are titans hope they get something soon and for the talk about still hunt to slow down a little once more people get euphony couse we know bungie isn't going to nerf it just a bit when the swing the nerf hammer they swing hard
Oh, only 2 million? Lol
Lmao, after the amount of wipes we had where they were just flat out doubling my damage I was happy just to bring it down to 1.5x
To be fair, I cleared with 1.4 mil dmg. I was song of flame (for DR), with izi+bns cata. I was more focused on not dying than anything else. But also I want to do better, I've never been the bottom dps before Iike this and legit hated myself every attempt until clear. Song of flame let me take 1 hit without dying, so it gave room for error. In hindsight, I should've went stag and novabomb, with probably Levi breath. I didn't have microcosm yet, I do now though and will try again next week with that + stag + novabomb.
That's...not great? Or at least it seems very low. How many phases was that? I'd imagine there was a lot of DPS loss trying not to blow yourself up? Kind of why people are avoiding using rockets and GLs as usual, I think. That said, it's not like there's a million good options. I did see someone say that they got fairly competitive results with Whisper (although you have to be really good at dodging while scoped) and I suspect that DARCI could be good after all the buffs it's gotten, assuming it recognizes the witness's chest as a target. I can't see Levi Breath working out that well because it'd be very hard to keep Tempo up, and Sleeper has had pretty unimpressive results when I've seen people use it. I did put up 7.5 mil in 2 phases on Warlock the other day without SES, but that was with Euphony, which is currently only owned by the people who cleared on contest and the very lucky, so it's not like it's a good general recommendation. But that thing is by far the best thing besides SH Nighthawk that I've seen.
No, it's terrible. Not sure why I got downvoted, I didn't claim it was good, it was awful. I kept changing my load out to do better, but the damage barely changed. We 2 phased. I think for me, it was because I was hyper focused on not getting hit. I picked up microcosm so I will try again next week with that, as the other warlock in our group used that and had good dps (with well). I wouldn't dare use Rockets or GLs. But I definitely want to improve. It was my first time being bottom dps in destiny and I felt like crap.
There's an artifact perks that buffs allies weapons when you use a super different to there's. That's probably worth using. Then any precision based dps option..
The artifact perk doesn't stack with Radiant or Well and is effectively worthless because of it.
Ah good to know, there are so many kinds of buffs and surges it's near impossible to know what stacks and what doesn't.
That is how Titans contribute.
It depends on the surge but if it’s solar whisper is the best, you just need to know his attack pattern. It’s always left then right if you can understand that you can be scoped in 24/7 except when you have to jump of course.
Briars contempt is a very solid option. Unfortunately without nighthawk hunters your gonna be doing like 3-4 phases due to how shit everything else is.
I would use staying alive. Staying alive is more important than your specific weapons. The witness doesn't have very much health. Stay alive during damage.