Desumo hardmode

When the Iron Tower was being released, the developers said that two of the boss encounters there would include a hard mode. One of these hard modes, involving the four Guardians on the roof of the tower, was quickly discovered and became widely known. The second one, however, was apparently a bit bugged (and hard to trigger even without bugs) and thus remained for a long time mostly the subject of speculation.

By the time it became a bit better known, about 1.5 years after the release of the Iron Tower, the cloaks that drop from this second hardmode were no longer particularly interesting as you could get better ones from e.g. T3 raids. Thus, very few people do this hardmode, as triggering it is a pain in the ass and the loot isn’t worth it. I did it for the first time only recently, so I thought I’d write it up in a blog post.

This second hardmode involves Desumo, the boss on the top floor of the tower, just below the roof. You might remember that when his health reaches 75%, he spawns 5 colored pads on the floor and starts doing some heavy AoE damage. Earlier in the dungeon there are also 5 minibosses, each of whom drops a wardstone (each of a different color). A player with a wardstone in his/her inventory can stand on the pad whose color matches the wardstone and thereby avoid being hit by Desumo’s AoE. An additional challenge comes from the fact that every now and then, the pads change color, so players have to move.

To trigger the hardmode, you must keep each of the five pads occupied by a player with a matching wardstone in his inventory. You have to ensure this within a few seconds after the pads spawn, otherwise you’ll get a message that the ‘pillars of faith have been desecrated’, which is a sign that the hardmode has failed (and you should reset the encounter if you want to try again). According to various forum posts, the hardmode similarly fails if anyone steps on a pad for which he doesn’t have the corresponding wardstone.

Thus the safest way of triggering the hardmode (indeed the only practical way, as far as I’m concerned) is to make sure that each of your five players has all 5 wardstones in his inventory. When the boss gets close to 75%, people should run downstairs and stand on the places where the pads will spawn. Once the pads do spawn, each person simply stays on his pad regardless of how its color changes (since he has all five wardstones anyway). After some time, Desumo disappears and a similar boss called Rabidus spawns in his place; from this point on it’s just a simple tank-and-spank fight.

Desumo shouts: Gggguuuuaaargh!
Rabidus shouts: Now I will visit my true fury upon you!

The most annoying part here is of course equipping everyone in the group with five wardstones. The minibosses downstairs drop 1 copy of each wardstone, so you’ll have to kill them once for each person in the group (and then reform the group so you’ll get a new instance of the dungeon). This can get pretty tedious and time-consuming. And of course, as in the normal Desumo fight, all wardstones disappear from your inventory when you kill the boss. (Note: it seems that you need 5 people to trigger the hardmode; we tried to do it as a group of 3 players first, to reduce the amount of time needed for farming the gems, but the hardmode didn’t trigger.)

Rabidus seems to be in many ways Desumo’s evil twin. He casts spells called Smite and Rebuke, but they do unholy damage instead of holy. And he has a buff called An Unholy Man’s Cursed Shield, whereas Desumo had a buff called A Holy Man’s Shield. Curiously, when the hardmode is triggered, all players get a 35-second beneficial buff called Divine Avenger (+10% damage mitigation, +10% scale, +20% damage multiplier, heals 1 percent every 1 second).

Loot: in addition to two blue items that could also drop from the normal mode Desumo, you will get a purple cloak. (Update: according to comments on the Youtube video mentioned below, the purple drop is not guaranteed.) We got an intelligence cloak but judging by bebot’s item database there are also 3 others:

Update: someone posted a very nice Youtube video of the Desumo/Rabidus fight.