Steel Path Mutalist Alad V is a Needless Exercise in Frustration

[JumboDragon]

Hello,

I just did the assassination quest for Mutalist Alad V on The Steel Path solo and it's an atrocious player experience. My mission ran for nearly 14 minutes just so I could get less than 20 seconds of time where Alad V was not invulnerable. Alad can only be damaged for a split second when he takes his collar off and uses it to do a knockdown explosion. If you don't get knocked down (even on Valkyr), you can get 1 or 2 hits in before he's invulnerable again. 

What ended up happening was just me wailing on a barely moving invulnerable Alad V for more than ten minutes just so I wouldn't miss the less than a second windows where he would take damage. I consider this rudely frustrating. I quit out of the game to write this post and won't play anymore tonight after the experience for the sake of needing a palette cleanser.

-Jumbo

[KitMeHarder]

Two words.

Reaper. Prime.

But yeah, it is a badly designed fight in solo.

[PhiThagRaid]

It is quite a weird fight, I find stacking slash/toxin procs while he is invulnerable to be quite effective, just leaving him alone as soon as he becomes vulnerable to not force him back to invulnerability. Last time I fought him my kubrow randomly 1-shot him when he had 80% of his health left, though.

[TheLexiConArtist]

The best time to hit Rotten Salad is when he takes over a friend, but that's not possible solo. Second best is when he deploys the collar as a Volt-shield, but going into melee range with him will cause him to end that vulnerability early.

 

The core problem is that his damage gating was never designed to properly scale up to higher levels - he's been a pain ever since Sortie assassinations if you're not bricking him in one shot or bypassing most of his defenses (old slash, toxin after armour-sundering).

It only got worse because he's one of the bosses who effectively cheat shield-gating in the same ways players are doing these days. Too much regeneration and guaranteed recharge opportunity, on top of being unable to even break the shield before the vulnerability damage-gate slams closed on you. 

Steel Path is just the icing on the turd-cake with the extra levels and modifiers magnifying the core problem up tenfold.

 

I find the best options currently are whittling him down with Trinity EV casts - eventually he's going to die from either the EV ticks despite diminished returns or your damage squeezing through to health if you actually manage to break the shield - or to stick to the Toxin + sunder-armour strategy (e.g. Shattering Impact) so that you can just take a big old poisonous dump on him whenever he decides to drop the plot armour.

As @PhiThagRaid said, it's possible to stack procs on him during the invulnerability so they tick him out when he deploys his baby Volt shield. Slashes can cause forced closing of the vulnerability gate since they hit the shields, so it's a matter of timing out your proc stacking and keeping distance when he's about to open up, so it can break though the shield recovery, while Tox is weakened by armour if you can't remove it. Pros and cons of either.

[Zeddypanda]

I don't know about steel path, but I did a sortie with him and I had a gun with carrier for keeping 10 stacks of magnetic on him at all times and a second gun for dealing damage while he was open. It was fairly awful.

 

Tbh I think you can remove "steel path" from the title and it still applies.

[Krilexis]

Applies to regular fight been farming Mesa parts sometimes I manage to get behind him just when vulnerable and kill him very quickly, sometimes he gets his back against a wall or something else and cant hit him. Stacking procs work well indeed. Didnt get to Eris SP yet though.

[PhiThagRaid]

10 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

I find the best options currently are whittling him down with Trinity EV casts - eventually he's going to die from either the EV ticks despite diminished returns or your damage squeezing through to health if you actually manage to break the shield - or to stick to the Toxin + sunder-armour strategy (e.g. Shattering Impact) so that you can just take a big old poisonous dump on him whenever he decides to drop the plot armour.

As @PhiThagRaid said, it's possible to stack procs on him during the invulnerability so they tick him out when he deploys his baby Volt shield. Slashes can cause forced closing of the vulnerability gate since they hit the shields, so it's a matter of timing out your proc stacking and keeping distance when he's about to open up, so it can break though the shield recovery, while Tox is weakened by armour if you can't remove it. Pros and cons of either.

Yeah, trin casts are quite powerful. Used to use them to carry myself through quest progress. xD

And you're right, Shattering Impact + Toxin procs would probably be better than slash procs.