English

To those who do not know: Pei-Ziao is the Marauder NPC boss located in Knot of Dementia, situated up the slope north of Prime Roots vortex.

Several times we encountered difficulties when attacking Pei-Ziao in smaller teams. Pei is, like all NPC bosses, level 200, but has very much HP and is regenerating at an extremely high rate. In addition, he has an invisible second self with him, "Pei's Wrath", with approximately the same HP, but fairly slow regeneration if any, and, besides, is taking seemingly double damage compared to Pei (I frequently see myself doing 4750 dmg or so onto him with a double target bomb spell).

When Pei has taken some damage, he will cast a spell throwing lumps of bark all around (similar animation as Shalaketh and Shakan) with the effect of stunning nearly all creatures within a range of 30m approximately (note that NPC bosses can only be hit by ele spells from <20m distance). Btw., "creatures", not homins, is correct: I once saw a mektoub mount brought in by a player, and a gibbai in pursuit , and it was the first time in my life I saw a stunned mektoub and gibbai.

The effect of that stunning is bad: Pei may be able to kill the tank and some players around, and will regenerate from any damage taken so far before the attacking party will be able to resume the attack. Fortunately, the number of stuns is limited to something between 7 and 10 times, each one occurring at a certain amount of dmg done (points on the decreasing life bar). More important: Only when Pei's Wrath is alive, the stunning will take effect, otherwise the pieces of bark will fly but no harm will be done.

Standard strategy therefore is to attack with double bomb spells (the only way to hit the invisible foe) after or before the first stun occured, then trying to kill Pei fast enough before the wrath respawns, which will be the case after a few minutes.

Due to the fast regeneration there has to be a minimum of ele firepower to harm Pei at all. I estimate that the equivalent of 12 master eles with standard amps (83% upwards) will suffice, enchant spamming not taken in account (it would need tons of sap crystals, and I nearly never use it there). Prerequisite is that all are firing without any break or delay. The more participants, the faster progress will be.

Free to play participants should not be underestimated. I reckon that a f2p with lvl 125 offensive elemental magic is able to deal about 60% of the damage of a master (lvl 250), a good f2p healer lvl 125 may be able to heal a full team together with one more of same level, and one celestial guardian, with few hp/sap shortage if any.

Unfortunately, I observed difficulties even with 4 full teams and some more present. Main reason was lack of coordination and efficiency: ele damage coming in sparsely with long interruptions, bomb spells not carried out or carried out when unnecessary, directions of the campaign leader not observed, teams insufficiently organized and scattered so that healing was insufficient to sustain fire, or too many healers compared to eles. Laggy connections of many participants may render an even larger party unable to beat Pei-Ziao.

A good test of firepower available is starting by 2 target bombs from the very beginning: If Pei's life bar shows constant degradation (no matter how slow) he can be considered dead soon. If it only oscillates between full and bit loss, all fire available has to be concentrated to achieve better damage. It is completely useless to surround Pei with 2, 3, or even more tanks, those players were of better use when nuking or healing somewhere. Scattered teams of 2, 4 etc. should form lines with other, comparably small teams, single players not in a team join a line (with consent of the respective team) as well.

Also noteworthy is that spray heal may not work when the healer is standing close to the wall, ricochet is recommended therefore.

When firepower is feeble, the decision should rest with the party leader whether to use bombs at all, and the commands be observed immediately. There are two possible ways for a smaller party: 1. killing wrath by bombs, then do as much dmg as possible to Pei and provoque as many dud stun spells as possible before wrath is back. In that case, depending how slow damage progress is, it will be advisable to kill wrath only once, or twice at maximum. 2. using the Farragut method (damn the torpedoes .. or wrath in that case) and do single damage straight through. That may require much patience as the maximum number of stuns has to be sustained in that case.

Yet demanding to give up after 6 or more stuns as I experienced lately seems inacceptable to me. I recall Pei runs at Leanon with small teams taking an hour and more, but we never gave up.

To summarize: When the party is small, success depends on organization, determination, and patience. Never forget that in a small party, the relative reward will be higher.