[2019] Master Nightmare Hunt: Despair with Crota is unreasonably difficult

My friends and I attempted to get all the time trial triumphs done for the masters nightmare hunts this week. First two were alright, we could see rapid improvement, and at best it took us two or three times to get the time trials completed. However, when confronted with Crota during the boss room, we found no way of killing him within a reasonable time. Here are the reasons as follows:

Crota one shots any guardian, even one with five dreambane mods and overshield. He can even hit BEHIND himself while striking another target.
The damage that you can accomplish against Crota during one of the sword phases is untenable. We did as much as 1/10 of his health bar during one damage phase, and at most got up to 3/10 of his health bar.
Crota can go everywhere in the boss room. Cover is negligible at best, and we tried a strategy of circumnavigating the boss around the room to draw aggro, but he would just kill us with his ranged attack. The only area that was semi safe is a small cave opening on the left side of the room looking in, but he can go around to the inside of the cave and slam you there.
None of the mods supreme mods do anything due to the fact that Crota cannot be damaged outside of the relic swords that the knights drop. Even if the Supreme Nightmare Crusher does work, it's not enough to actually matter.

Before you scream "you're underlight/bad" please remember that we did the other two trials pretty quickly. I'm 965 light with artifact, my friends were both 964. Please share your experience and let me know if you found a strategy that works. I'm waiting for an update/video from the likes of Gladd, Datto, or Esoterickk showing me and my team what we did wrong, but for the most part it feels untenable.

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Originally posted by Gonet0Plaid

I just posted this in another similar thread on my experiences getting the triumph, so I’ll just copy/paste my thoughts/findings while we did it:

“Out of the all the NM Hunts this was undeniably the worst to “figure out”. We decided to do it last when we were doing time trials, and after literally holding W through the first 2 we hit a bump on Crota for a good while. After being tilted for a couple of attempts we looked at our builds, talked about what was top priority, and what classes we needed to run to make it “easier”. The largest thing that would make him easier, and how we got the time trial triumph, was figuring out to basically global the acolytes and knights. Getting to Crota wasn’t an issue, we got there in like 7-8 minutes and figured the timer would be more lenient, but just getting the swords quickly and effectively was the issue. The solution: top tree Orpheus hunter tether to the rescue. One hunter could almost full refresh off of one add wave (just get it down as they spawn in) and they’d all die in seconds if you have solar/NM shield breaker. Bare minimum we decided to run two, to alternate to ensure orbs and availability for the next, and eventually ran a 3rd as a buffer and the final discovery. The last discovery: you could stealth (via top tree dodge) into Crota with a sword and he wouldn’t even try to slam you.

So the cycle would be: enter, spawn adds and tether, Edgewise (or some other solar wep) the shields to evaporate the stack, someone with arc bust the knights so they are weakened a bit or flat our die to the tether share, clean them up quickly if alive or untouched (Divinity with other weps or just Izanagi them), 3rd gets aggro while one of the hunter stealths into him and slams to force the knee with the 2nd waiting just incase of a whiff, we beat him up until the swords ran out, and then repeated the process. On our clear we had some whiffs on breaks, but the 3rd hunter was able to cover a missing tether or stealth and got the triumph just north of the 13 minute mark.

While the scaling of this particular Hunt felt off compared to the others, and near tilting at first, taking a step back to figure out what was our top priority in the encounter (killing the adds before they could even do anything thus forcing him into a perpetual stat of kneeling) it revealed that it was very doable. As long as you can control the adds quickly, and get to Crota without him one hit KOing you, the timer actually seems fairly lenient even at 965-970 (which is still the sword bracket most people face).”

Strategy in the face of challenge. I like it.

Can’t wait to see what other strategies emerge.

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