ID#25104
I can't be positive I was the 1st to encounter Shadow Krampus, but I do believe so. I was driving at the time. I don't recommend others drive and play at the same time, but in my defense, I'm a professional driver, often tasked with multiple tasks like looking at maps, talking with customers on the phone, and driving a large truck through Houston traffic all at the same time. I haven't had any issues in over 2 decades other than getting rear ended a couple times, ironically by people playing or texting on their phones. I also play the game so much, I pretty much can play by muscle memory at this point. But that's me. I still don't advise playing and driving at the same time to the normal driver.
When I 1st encountered Shadow Krampus, I had no idea what I had encountered. It was some new special patrol event. Despite being new, I didn't give much concern to it. I have 2 of the top toons in the game. Pretty much any non PvP aspect of the game is fairly easy for my toons. So I took a quick screen shot and hit "FIGHT", without much thought. He had 100,000 life!!!! Holy cow! Still, he couldn't be that hard, right? Just durable., I was sure. So I sped through the fight to move on and not only didn't win, I didn't even seem to scratch him. I might be exaggerating. It's possible he broke a nail hitting me, but I couldn't be sure with two swollen eyes. In shock, but still driving and unable to give much attention, I took another screen shot to analyze when it was safer to do so.
After getting home, I wrote Justin. For those who don't know, he's the owner and main developer for Heroes Rising and at least one other game. He gave me the skinny but not the fat of this new NPC villain. The skinny being it would be a random encounter found in any patrol, and was for high level players only. Later, through Todd Goode's questioning, we learned it was for level 700+ toons. Justin told me it would be very hard and something for players to work towards and look forward to beating. I told him I would have it beat before the New Year. He told me good luck but that he didn't expect anyone to beat it till well into the New Year, and that it was designed to give even the very best of us trouble. Challenge accepted.
I brought what little information I had to my leaguemates. Before anyone else seemed to have found him, I somehow found him again. Two times in 3 days. In all actuality, with as much as I patrol, that seemed to be the rate I was running into Shadow Krampus from when he first appeared till I finally beat him. Two times every 3 days. This time, I was able to catalog the entire fight. I used a TON of fight cons to beat him. I also had changed up my suit to battle his Supernatural Core we knew he was wearing from the screenshot of the 1st encounter. Oddly enough, instead of 100,000 life, he only had 70,000 life. Even with less life and my toon conned up quite heavily, I got my rear end handed to me on a Supernatural silver platter. Holy cow, was this guy tough!
I took all the screenshots of the fights and shared them with my leaguemates as I also studied the fight feed. I quickly deduced Shadow Krampus was using my own build style against me, but only in Supernatural. That, combined with the change in life made me think he was somehow mirroring the player toon's gear to some degree or another, possibly defaulting it to Supernatural. I went to Justin about my finds to see if I could glean any new insights. He assured me that Shadow Krampus wasn't copying the player toon's suit and had a set suit. I argued, pointing to the fact that he was using my same build style. Justin replied he wanted him to be tough. I then cursed him, telling him that build design is to fight tougher opponents, and Krampus was already the tougher opponent. And while I smiled at the hidden compliment, it still didn't make sense. If his suit was set, why did his life change? "Oops!" said Justin at this new revelation. It turns out that the difficulty level of Shadow Krampus accidentally got tied to the difficulty level of the patrol he was found on. It was supposed to be static......... I blew a bunch of cons against a god stacked deck........
Anyway, Justin fixed the issue. I ran into Shadow Krampus a few more times. His life went down to 30,000. But he was still nigh impossibly hard. I continued to gather screenshots and share them with my leaguemates as well as study them as well as I could myself. A second time with massive cons was attempted and failed. Then, my leaguemate Mike Gibbon beat him. He was the 1st. He built a massive Supernatural Resist suit and put on TONS of cons. Rakly Dominguez was the 2nd, managing to do so with only one con. At this point, I had kind of given up trying. I had already wasted TONS of cons twice for not. The prize ring, while epic, wasn't really something that fit in my build style. So I often just attacked with no thought to it, for awhile.
Next, Michael Brody beat Shadow Krampus. Something had recently changed though. Our toons had just had 3 gear slots added to their suits. This was pretty big. My odds of beating Shadow Krampus had just increased dramatically. I still didn't have faith in my current ability to necessarily beat Shadow Krampus, so I still didn't use any cons. I just built a suit based on what I knew of my opponent. My plan wasn't to win. It was to gain enough new information with the new gear slots added, to determine how many cons it would take to beat him. And then, to my surprise, I simply won without the cons.
At some point between when Rakly got his ring and and I got mine, one other player beat Shadow Krampus, but has not come forth to disclose who they are. I assume it is a member of WMD, but can't know for sure. Whoever it is, congrats. That was a tough fight.
Now, what we know about Shadow Krampus are as follows:
Life 30,000
Supernatural Core and damage.
Poison
Poison Resist
Stat Redux of each type around 35%
Stat Steal of each type unknown quantity
Stun
Stun Resist
Element Resists of 60.2%
That said, those who had the most success relied heavily on Supernatural Resist. He is heavy on stat redux and stat steal. That part will be tricky. I won't tell you how to combat that, because it's also my own style. But I will say you have to find a way to counter his ability to steal or reduce your stats. I advice a multi pronged approach to this problem. Next, you're going to need to be able to do lots of damage. There's a few ways to do this. Poison is a pretty effective one against high life toons, but will still be resisted quite a bit. Plus damage, if you have plenty enough, is almost always a sure fire way to get at least some damage in, provided you can hit him. Auras and Burn are going to be tough to fill enough to be effective against such a high life, high danger opponent, without sacrificing much needed effects elsewhere. He resists base element damage by 60.2%. So dropping your core and hitting him with unreduced X damage may help a lot. My toon has very little Plus Damage. I rely heavily on using unresisted, coreless, neutral X Damage often. I did so when I beat Shadow Krampus as well.
Good Luck, everyone. He's a bugger.
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