This is the hardest achievements I've boxed live. Took me ~20 attempts over the last couple of weeks. This run was a botched job but a win is a win. I'm glad there is at least one fight in the expansion that requires some effort, though I really dislike fights against mobs that will port and then summon you if you have certain DoTs/Debuffs on them.
Basic strat:
- DoT, feign death, Call of the Hero (CotH) to kill the illusion mobs
- Have a mage gate out of instance next to the zone-in NPC
- Slowly kill the real Jak to minimize image / tiger adds
- Have the CotH mage zone in after Jak HP locks and summon ASAP after he teleports
- Haul *** to teleport spot
- Gate the mage again, repeat.
Things I found that don't work:
- DoTs on Jak
- swarm pets on Jak
- a mage actively casting Host of the Elements on Jak
- having an aggro over time spell (I unmemmed Parlay for Power in the middle of this run...)
- having your CotH mage stand on the other side of the city (Images spawn on and attack the mage, this can be handled by having your mage actively running around as they spawn, but they miiiiiight share aggro with Jak even if they despawn without getting near him, making the mage unable to CotH).
I accidentally cast Blood of Tearac on Jak before the first port at 6:19 (I still don't know how this happened, maybe a keybind issue?) which caused him to summon me. I was able to recover by hitting deflection and then bringing my CotH mage over to the shadowknight and popping CotH. I had to do this twice because when I triggered /follow on my boxes they started running crazy which totally derailed my flow. Very sloppy!!
Initially I had a nice multi-macro that used a shadowknight and two mages to kill the three illusions at the start of the encounter. The mages would defensive buff their water pet, pop Frenzied Burnout and send the pet at the Jak illusion while the third mage would cast CotH. This was too unreliable because sometimes the pet would instantly kill Jak and other times it wouldn't kill him before CotH. DoT, FD, CotH using the shadowknight works well enough but isn't as fun or fast.
For a few attempts I would use the bard to pull the thugs away from Jak, CotH the bard and then pull Jak out of line-of-sight of the thug's path. This works sometimes but is unreliable so I just accepted having to tank one thug each time I fought Jak.
Jak's reset time is 40s, so after the third illusion or teleport you've got 40s to re-enage. It takes a little bit of time to CotH, invis up, get /follow working, but I can typically re-engage within this window even on the furthest port spot. The first fight location was on that spot and I got there 30s after the third illusion died. I have my pets attack Jak first so my shadowknight doesn't die while my group is moving in.
High DPS is counterproductive in this mission, so the two mages I have that aren't CotHing are basically useless. I considered swapping one of them for a healer merc. I probably will do that next time. Hell I could probably swap both of them for a player merc and the only time it'd be a problem is on the initial engage when I don't have pets to send in to take the first hit.
I shifted to a shadowknight for this expansion and he's been performing very well, however he is terrible for this mission because of the amount of time he spends being unable to lifetap. Jak spends 100 seconds in an HP locked state twice in the encounter while you have tigers/images/thugs beating on you. You can lifetap the thugs but that makes things awkward for me because my mages want to assist and nuke whatever my shadowknight targets. I didn't use all my defensive cooldowns during this fight, but even if I did I'd still have to spend a considerable amount of time fighting with minimal self-buffs. If I had my previous group with a war + sha + pal I'd probably try to just no-damage tank the adds. Most folks either off-tank or kite the thugs, which is way more reliable than what I did.