Infinity and I made some attempts on good old Octopus-chan that you guys have mentioned. On our best attempt the two of us got him down 33% before he ran out of mana and we died as a result.
Then I respecced to tank build and we would've pretty much crushed him except templar + prophet isn't much DPS
(as an aside, I do not enjoy the cost of tanking in this game, so I respecced back later that day. mad props to all you tanks out there, I would NOT be able to handle doing no damage while grinding and having huge repair bills!).
Here are some tips about the boss:
1) Octopus boss is more or less immobile. He does not require tanking at all, since almost all of his attacks are AOE. He will not even move beyond the water, although he will still spam his AOE skills from the water. This means you can go balls to the wall with DPS and not have to worry about aggro on this fight.
2) He has three primary attacks: a weak tidal wave(~1k dmg), a strong melee cleave(2-4k damage, depending) and an ink attack(no damage, lowers focus 25%)
3) There is no noticeable way to dodge his attacks, as we tried many different positioning angles.
From our testing runs, we determined that for party play, grouping up for optimal AOE healing would be the most solid way to sustain through the fight for characters that are not tanky enough. Also, this fight is most definitely a gear check, similar to how the first boss in OS was pre-nerf(not enough HP? come back later).
At 35, a good Prophet with, as earlier said, investment in Dark Prayer and Crimson Chain, would be the key to victory. Snowfall may also be beneficial except it heals quite slow and the radius is quite small, so you would have to be grouped up tightly.
At 40, I think grouping everyone together and making judicious use of a talented-up Benediction would make this fight a cakewalk.
Edit: Some thoughts regarding balance.
I am a primarily grind-oriented player. I enjoy dungeons less than grinding monsters, and while they are fun to do once in awhile, they are by no means the reason I enjoy Eldevin. However, I do feel that dungeons should be both difficult and rewarding. Eldevin has only been live for a few weeks now, and already players have some of the highest level content(TR) on farm status. This will of course happen, as the most motivated, hardcore players will always exhaust content faster than developers can make it.
My suggestion, though, is rather than reduce the difficulty of dungeons so everyone can breeze through it, I'd much rather see it left as a difficult challenge so players can invent solid strategies for killing bosses. However, the rewards should be commensurate with the challenge.
I hope that HCS will strike a good balance between making challenging content, but also balancing content across the board so that appropriate rewards match appropriate challenges. So far, there are certainly rewarding areas, and there are certainly challenging areas, but they don't always match correctly.
Edited by huhbum, 19 December 2013 - 15:27.