| Name | Exploring the Deep |
| Category | General |
The Luxon elite mission, the Deep, has become much more profitable with the addition of the new super chest that spawns after defeating Kanaxai. Now each party member receives either a Kanaxai weapon, or an inscribable, rare skinned weapon exclusive to the Deep and Urgoz chests, plus two pieces of Jade. If completed in Hard Mode, the chest drops twice the loot. Fast completions on Hard Mode are now some of the best farming in the game, and it's fun too!
To get to the Deep, travel to the Luxon capital city of Cavalon in Cantha. To get to the Deep, you will either need a ferry, or to buy a Deep Passage scroll from the faction rewards NPC for 1000 Luxon faction. Ferries are much less common now that you can buy the scrolls, however you can buy the scrolls from other players, or if you have a friend who is already in the Deep, and you have been there before, he can give you a ferry there. To get a ferry from a friend in the Deep, have him click the "Guild Hall" button in his guild tab, and meet him in his hall. Have him invite you to his group, then click the "Leave Guild Hall" button in his tab to transport you both to the Deep.
Once there, you'll have to form a 12 man team to tackle the mission. With the chest being the big reward there now, there's little reason not to take the full 12 players. Most pick up groups run a build very similar to the classic "Steel Wall" strategy. If you want to get a fast group, roll up one of these characters:
The Tanks: Recall Warriors
The front of a Deep team is 3 Warriors that form the "Steel Wall" of the defense.
Recall Tank Warrior/Assassin
Shove, Sever, Gash, Dolyak Signet, Riposte, Defensive Stance, Recall, Resurrection Signet
10+2 Swordsmanship, 11+1 Strength, 10+1 Tactics
In addition to this skillset, all of the Warriors will need to have an Icy weapon for certain encounters. Make sure you have one ready when asked! There is not a lot of room for variation in this build. You will need Shove and Dolyak Signet to overcome several encounters and environmental effects and your job in the wall requires you to have great defense. One potential variation uses an axe:
Recall Axe Warrior/Assassin
Shove, Cyclone Axe, Executioner's Strike, Dolyak Signet, Riposte, Defensive Stance, Recall, Resurrection Signet
10+2 Axe Mastery, 11+1 Strength, 10+1 Tactics
Warriors in The Deep are true tanks. For most fights you will be lining up with the other Warriors to form a wall blocking the mobs while your nukers kill. To pull, you will be using Recall. Put Recall on an ally, the run in to aggro mobs. Once they all get on you, drop Recall to teleport back to your team and rejoin the wall. Practice pulling and rejoining the wall quickly is the key to being a successful Warrior in The Deep.
Nukers: Fire Elementalists
Behind the wall, dealing most of the damage, are a core of 3 Fire Elementalist nukers:
Searing Flames Elementalist/Monk
Searing Flames, Glowing Gaze, Mark of Rodgort, Fire Attunement, Meteor Shower Glyph of Lesser Energy, Glyph of Sacrifice, Resurrection Chant
12+4 Fire Magic, 12 Energy Storage, 3 Healing Prayers
Searing Flames is the best Fire Elementalist for the Deep, especially in multiples. It has great AoE damage and energy management built, as well as a good combat res from Glyph of Sacrifice plus Resurrection Chant. For variations, change the Mark of Rodgort to Liquid Flame or another skill. The team should have a Mark of Rodgort, but not everyone needs it.
If you don't have Nightfall but still want to do the Deep, your options are more limited. One of the best that remains is the classic Dual Attunement, Echo Nuker alternative:
Echo Shower Elementalist/Mesmer
Elemental Attunement, Fire Attunement, Meteor Shower, Fireball, Incendiary Bonds, Rodgort's Invocation, Arcane Echo, Resurrection Signet
12+4 Fire Magic, 12 Energy Storage
As an Elementalist, your job is to stay behind the wall at all times, moving up just enough to nuke the monsters caught on it. When possible, stay as close to the wall the tanks are lining up near as possible. That will funnel the mobs into a tight ball when they aggro onto you, setting them up for easy nuking. Even though you're a nuker, do not skimp on self defense. Mobs will aggro onto you through the wall, and you will take ranged damage. Make sure that you can survive those volleys, you're only good if you're alive to nuke.
The Monks: Power Healing
Supporting a Deep team are 4 heavy healing Monks. The strongest pure healing build is the Healer's Boon Monk introduced in Nightfall:
Healer's Boon Monk/Elementalist
Dwayna's Kiss, Ethereal Light, Signet of Rejuvenation, Healing Seed, Heal Party, Healer's Boon, Glyph of Lesser Energy, Rebirth
12+4 Healing Prayers, 12+1 Divine Favor
This Monk has advantages over others with both faster and bigger heals than their peers. Healer's Boon + Heal Party is particularly good in the Deep. However, a mix with a more classic Monk elite, Word of Healing, will give more flexibility:
Classic WoH Monk/*
Word of Healing, Orison of Healing, Signet of Rejuvenation, Healing Seed, Heal Party, Protective Spirit, Extinguish, Rebirth
12+4 Healing Prayers, 10+1 Divine Favor, 8+1 Protection Prayers
Unlike the Boon Monks, Word Monks rely on Word to do most of their healing on targets below half health. However they gain additional Protection skills from the free slots for Protective Spirit and Extinguish. Both are important in the Deep. Protective Spirit can save a caster that gets aggro through the wall, while Extinguish is important for removing conditions out of range alongside Heal Party. Try to mix the Monks up in the Deep. You are bringing 4 total on the team, so there's going to be a lot of healing overlap.
Utility: Necromancers
Rounding out the team are a pair of Necromancers. Unlike the other characters, they don't have a specific role, instead they do a number of jobs the other characters cannot. The main build that every team needs looks like this:
Spiteful Utility Necromancer/Mesmer
Spiteful Spirit, Reckless Haste, Spinal Shivers, Well of Blood, Blood Ritual, Arcane Echo, Inspired Enchantment, Resurrection Signet
12+4 Curses, 10+1 Soul Reaping, 8+1 Blood Magic
The Spiteful Necro deals excellent damage with Arcane Echo + Spiteful Spirit, and has a number of skills that are important for certain rooms or encounters. Most importantly, Inspired Enchantment to deal with Kanaxai. Many teams run 2 of this Necro, however some teams prefer to have a bipper in the other Necromancer spot instead:
Bipper Necromancer/Monk
Blood is Power, Blood Ritual, Blood Renewal, Well of Blood, Healing Breeze, Heal Area, Protective Spirit, Rebirth
9+4 Blood Magic, 9+1 Soul Reaping, 12 Healing Prayers
His job is straightforward, he needs to keep all of the other casters bipped to maintain their energy. Ask that players ping their energy when they are in need of a bip, and cast it on them even when they don't need it to keep their energy up. Unlike some other areas, you will need to have higher hit points in The Deep when bipping to survive many of the environmental effects. Make sure you have armor swaps available to get above 200 health when needed.
Once your team has its players, the group will reorder the party list. Usually, that means the Warriors on top, followed by the Elementalists, then the Monks, and finally the Necromancers (with the BiP being on the bottom if there is one).
Entering the Deep
When you first enter The Deep you'll be presented with 4 teleport pads, only 1 of which will be active. Each teleporter will take 3 players, after which it shuts down and the next one opens. Those 3 players are taken to a separate room where they will have to fight a few mobs and a Kanaxai Aspect before meeting back up with the rest of the team. Every room in The Deep has an Aspect of Kanaxai, a boss-like monster that causes a global effect in the area while it is alive. Also, Aspects require a trick to kill. After taking 20% of their health as damage, they stop taking any damage until they are knocked down. That's why it's very important for all of the Warriors to have Shove, so that you can quickly knock down an Aspect and resume dealing damage. Once an Aspect is killed, his global effect goes away, making finishing the room much easier.
The beginning fights are some of the hardest in The Deep since they must be done separately. It is very important that the team splits up properly for the first rooms to successfully complete this part. Most teams use the "134 134 134 222" split pattern to pass this challenge. The numbers indicate which teleporter each party member should enter, in order. So, the top Warrior goes into the first teleporter with the top Elementalist and the top Monk, the middle Warrior into the third with the middle Ele and the second Monk, etc, while both Necromancers and the last Monk enter the second teleporter. Note that teleporters open from right to left, so the 1 teleporter is the rightmost one while 4 is the leftmost one. Once the rooms have been entered, the groups with Warriors will have to carefully pull and nuke the mobs in their room, while the two Necromancer team should keep Blood is Power or Blood Ritual on the Monk in their room so that he can spam Heal Party for the other Monks.
As each of the small rooms is cleared, they lead into a larger, central chamber. Each squad should continue to carefully pull and kill mobs from those rooms. Eventually the path should be clear to meet up with the other rooms, to pull and nuke bigger mobs and more quickly reassemble the team. Once the way is clear you should pull and kill the Kanaxai Aspect in the central chamber. Dropping him will open the doors to all the previous chambers, letting you go back to rescue any unsuccessful group, and clear the room holding your Necromancers back. Once your party has been reassembled, the hardest part of the mission is behind you, and you're ready to tackle the rest of The Deep.
The Early Chambers
Now that the team has reformed, it's time to start practicing the techniques that you'll use to clear the rest of the Deep. For Warriors, this means forming the defensive wall to block a choke point, or off of a protrusion of an existing wall, to make a big corner for mobs to catch in. Also, at least one Warrior will need to sweep out ahead of the team to trigger popups and gather aggro, before running or teleporting back to the team to rejoin the wall. Casters need to position themselves behind the wall, outside of casting range. You creep up just far enough to cast when you need to, so that you can step back and break aggro immediately if you gather any. Where you should stand depends on what kind of wall it is. If the Warriors are forming in a choke point, you should stand directly behind the Warriors. Standing off to the side encourages mobs to try and run around the wall if you gather aggro. If you are building the wall next to an existing wall, you should stand as close to the existing wall as possible, again just out of casting range of the Warriors. That will pull the monsters tightly into a corner for convenient nukes. Monks have one additional job: when the Warrior is out sweeping and taking fire, it is important for you to be spamming Heal Party to deliver long range heals to him. That enables him to stay out longer and gather more aggro for bigger pulls, and a faster run of the Deep.
Now that's understood, taking out the first room will be easy, as it is full of easy Leviathan mobs. Wall off the gate and pull the left part of the room. From there clear the central and right mobs, resetting the wall as needed. Once the mobs are clear, kill the Kanaxai Aspect to finish clearing the room.
In order to progress to the next room, 5 party members will have to stand on separate square panels to open the gate. The door shuts as soon as any of those players leaves their square. Also, as soon as any player moves past a certain point past the gate, a huge wave of Nightmares will spawn in the previous room and rush towards the gate, massacring anyone left behind. To get past the gate, the Warriors with Recall and two other party members (usually the Necros) should stand on the gate switches while the rest of the party moves just past the gate. Then the Warriors should drop Recall at the same time, while the Necros run to the gate. The Necros can then kill themselves with Blood Ritual or Blood is Power, and be teleported across the gate with Rebirth. However, even if they don't have suicide skills, or if someone else is left behind, the Nightmares that spawn when you move forward to trigger them will make quick work of your stragglers, enabling you to Rebirth them across the gate.
The next room is filled with Outcasts, and an Aspect that inflicts an Energy Burn on your entire party every 30 seconds. Heavy use of Blood Ritual will be needed here. Carefully pull and nuke the first two mobs of Outcasts (the first can usually be killed from the previous room, through the gate), before pulling the Aspect. Once the Aspect is down, the rest of the room can be pulled and killed. Be mindful of your aggro circle as you progress, the later Outcast mobs are above on ridges and can aggro onto you below if you aren't careful. Once the room is cleared, proceed to the doorway to the next one.
This room contains the Aspect of Failure, which suppresses all spellcasting. All of the casters need to stay outside of the room, while the tanks wall off the doorway and pull the mobs in the room to it. As long as you stay outside of the room, clearing out all of the melee mobs is easy. After they're dispatched, a path should be clear to run to the next room. Hug the right wall as you move to avoid the archers and Kanaxai Aspect.
This should bring you to the Leviathan room - you can see the Leviathan at the center of the room, encased in jade. This room has the Aspect of Shadow, which prevents any enchantments from being cast, and has inconveniently placed Reborn Irukandji who drop spirits of disenchantment. For this zone, straight healing and nuking will be necessary, as well as careful emanagement since you will be without your BiP. The Irukandji respawn when killed, so ignore them as you progress.
The area is infested with Oni of the Deep popups. They do not appear until you get very close to them, so your tank needs to be very thorough in his sweeping of the area to avoid potential popups later. When fighting Oni, it's important that no one ever attacks an Oni with an weapon. Oni teleport randomly when hit, so a melee or wand hit can easily teleport an Oni past the wall to rampage in your casters. Stand there and tank and let the fire do all the work.
Clear out as many Oni as you can from the previous room, then proceed through the room while hugging the left wall. As soon as you get close enough, the Leviathan will break free of its jade prison and start attacking. Its hits deal up to 600 damage on normal mode, and even harder on hard mode, and since the Monks can't use enchantments they cannot possibly keep up with the damage. Run past the Leviathan as fast as possible, and stop just outside of its range. There will likely be an Oni popup here, nuke and kill it quickly, then stabilize and regen energy before proceeding. Kill the Kanaxai Aspect, and keep hugging the wall and killing Oni popups as you've practiced until you reach a set of stairs down into the next room with a single Reborn Irukandji at the top. Leave the Irukandji alive and set up a wall here for the next room, because this is where things start to get messy.
Later Chambers
You should now be at the Scorpion Aspect room. This is the room where groups most often wipe, so wake up, pay attention, and be ready to go slowly. Every 10 seconds or so, everyone in the room will be teleported to the nearest enemy and knocked down. For many of your casters this can be instant death with all the Oni with Demonic Agility, so you need to avoid letting that happen! To do that, everyone needs to stay at the top of the stairs, near the Reborn Irukandji, while a Warrior pulls. Since you are near the Irukandji, even if you get teleported you will go backwards to the jellyfish and not into waiting death from the Oni. Set up a wall at the top of the stairs, nuke, and repeat. Make sure the Warrior clears out as much as he can, even past the radar range of the party, to make the next part go smoothly.
Once the way is clear, everyone needs to run together down the stairs, to the right, and back up another set of stairs to another safe spot. It is important that everyone leaves together to avoid getting strung out too much. Some players will likely be teleported and might even die, don't worry about it just keep going and get to the safe point. Once you're up there, you can clear out some more mobs using the same technique and sneak down to res anyone who might have died. Once the room is clear again, everyone needs to creep down, hugging the right wall. You'll clear out one more group of Outcasts, and then fight the Scorpion Aspect. Your casters will be vulnerable here, and expect to take some deaths if your Monks aren't fast. So drop it as fast as you can to clear the world effect, have the party recover, and continue deeper.
After this room, you'll find yourself going down a long corridor with no monsters. When you turn the corner, however, several groups of monsters will spawn behind you and start rushing in. Before you get to the corner, make sure everyone is ready to run. When the monsters spawn, run forward until the corridor turns back to the left, and huddle in the corner there. All of the spawning mobs are melee, and will ball up trying to get to you, perfect for AoE! Your Warriors can form a defensive line around the casters if they have time. But don't count on it, you're in a race, kill those Oni before they can kill you!
Once those are dispatched the way should be clear for a while, so take the opportunity to relax a bit. You'll be going over several bridges with lots of Oni popups, just like you've seen throughout the mission. Set up the wall, pull, nuke, move on. Continue until you get to the bottom and see a huge cave in front of you.
At the cave, all of the casters need to stop and unequip their wands and staves. If you have a melee weapon, great, otherwise do this section without a weapon. When you enter the room dozens of Sapping Nightmares are going to spawn, who love to cast Chaos Storm on anyone foolish enough to equip a wand or staff. If no one has a wand equipped you can pull them all at once easily, as the Nightmares are fragile and will die quickly without doing too much damage. But if someone has a wand out, prepare to get hit by 20 Chaos Storms at once. It isn't pretty. After the nightmares have been cleared out, get ready for a long walk of wall and nuke.
Walk through the cavern you just cleared, skipping the Kanaxai Aspect. You'll be at another room, this one full of Oni, Outcasts, and new flowers that inflict poison and bleeding. You know what to do, set up a wall and pull the mobs out of the room. The flowers here can be turned off like any other, your Warrior should touch them all as he sweeps through the room. Keep hugging the wall as you move, skipping this Aspect as well, and proceed down the corridor. The corridor has more Oni and Nightmare popups. You know what to do. At the end of the corridor will be the Aspect of Torment, the final Aspect before the big fight with Kanaxai himself. Pull it out of the mob of Outcasts and drop him, clear the Outcasts, and get ready for the final battle.
Kanaxai, Lord of the Deep
Like every other room so far, you're going to kill Kanaxai by pulling him out of his room and killing him at the entrance. The room itself inflicts a constant -8 degen on the entire party, not something that you can sit in and fight for a long period of time. Kanaxai's chamber has become a lot more difficult to pull with the nerfs to Recall. Your Warriors will have it stripped off if they aggro a Nightmare now, so they have to go in and pull without it.
Kanaxai is like any of the Aspects you have fought so far, becoming invincible after taking 20% damage and requiring a knockdown to continue. However, unlike previous mobs, Kanaxai spawns 8 adds every time you knock him down. On top of his own damage, this can overwhelm a team, especially if you knock him down when you don't need to. The trick to dealing with this, and to dealing with Kanaxai, is that there can only be 24 monsters spawned in the room at a time. If there are, you can knock him down as often as you like without getting adds, making the encounter a cakewalk. The trick is to separate Kanaxai from the 24 mobs in his room, and pull him to the entrance on his own.
How easy that is will depend on his spawn. If you are lucky, the Nightmares will be off to the side and you can pull Kanaxai with a longbow to coax him out of the pack. If that's the case, feel lucky as you pull and dispatch Kanaxai. However oftentimes you will need to kill some of the nightmares to get him on his own. If you do that, he will spawn more when you knock him down again, so you'll need to replace those mobs. In that case, you need to pull Kanaxai to an out of the way place, like the back of his chamber, and quickly knock him down there. That should spawn 8 more mobs, after which you can drop Recall and wait for Kanaxai to reset his aggro. Repeat until there are 24 mobs out of the way, then pull Kanaxai on his own out of the room to the entrance.
When you get him to the entrance, surround him with your Warriors so he can't run away and start the DPS. Kanaxai will start spamming an enchantment, Nightmare Refuge, on himself. This causes 50% of attacks to miss and 50% of spells cast on him to fail, as well as heals him for 1000 HP when it expires after 10 seconds. You need to stop it in order to kill Kanaxai. This is what the Necro is for. Put Spinal Shivvers on him, and have your Warriors pull out their cold weapons. This will interrupt Kanaxai most of the time when he casts the spell. If he does get it off, use Inspired Enchantment to quickly remove it and prevent the heal. Since you are removing a monster enchantment, Inspired Enchantment will not be replaced and the skill will recharge instantly! Without Nightmare Refuge, Kanaxai will inevitably die from your attack.
Once he is down, his chest will spawn. The -8 degen will never go away, and there are still nightmares around, so don't get greedy and wipe just yet! Carefully pull and kill the remaining nightmare groups, then proceed as a team to open the chest. Remember to cast Heal Party! Each teammate will receive 2 chunks of jade, in addition to a Kanaxai green or inscribable factions weapon with a rare skin. This chest, and the one in Urgoz' Warren, are the only source of inscribable Zodiac weapons in the game, among other skins, so you're likely to get something valuable. Better yet, if you completed the zone on Hard Mode, you'll receive a double drop of loot. If your own drops don't, one of your teammates will certainly get something that will whet your appetite for a return trip. Congratulations on completing The Deep!
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