Crucible of Flame: Guide

Launched with TERA: Rising, the Crucible of Flame is an instanced dungeon for level 60 characters. Access is available through the NPC Vold in Velika or through Instance Matching to any level 60 character. A multi-stage instance with twice the altitude and thrice the difficulty, the crucible requires more teamwork than other dungeons.

Overview

The Crucible of Flame has two stages with multiple rounds each. It’s designed to test the best of the best—Instance Matching won’t even let you in without tier 13 gear.

The Story So Far…

Before the Age of Mortals, many of TERA’s gods devised tests to determine whether individual mortals were worthy. Most of the tests have been lost to time, but recently adventurers re-discovered Baharr’s Crucible of Flame. Baharr designed the crucible to test how well a group could work together—and, given the opportunity, how far that group could push its limits. Because he’s the god of fire, Baharr also put in plenty to burn you.

To Enter the Dungeon

The crucible allows players one entrance daily (twice for elite status players). Need a group to go with you? Use the Instance Matching system. Instance Matching offers Valkyon Response rewards for completing the first stage of the dungeon.

Got a group ready? Head to Velika and talk to Vold outside the Legion of Arms. He offers the Eye of the Fire quest, which rewards you for completing the upper stage of the dungeon.

There are two stages to the Crucible of Flame—and each is on its own level.

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Stage One: The Foundation

You enter the lower, Foundation level at the center hub. Four outer rooms branch in each direction—the North, East, South, and West Braziers. Your goal in this stage is to defend five spires—one in each location, including the Foundation—from destruction.

In the center hub is a stone marked “Opening Move.” Activating it begins the timer, the scorekeeping, and the instance. But don’t start yet! Once you interact with the opening move, you’ll have 10 seconds before doors close off the brazier rooms. Those doors stay closed until the monsters that spawn in each of the rooms are dealt with. So the key here is to position a party member in each room before triggering the opening move.

You can ride mounts in the Crucible. If someone prematurely triggers the instance start, you might have enough time to get inside a brazier before the door closes, but you may not have enough time to communicate who should go where, so it’s best to know your optimal location ahead of time.

Lower Round One: The Braziers

Once the door to the brazier closes, you’re sealed off from getting or giving help to the rest of your party. The only things that open the door—and allow you to access your party again—are defeating all waves of mobs in your room, or someone destroying the spire. While the mobs in each brazier room differ, your main objective in each brazier is the same—protect the spire.

West Brazier (5 waves)

As the spire appears in the west brazier, a dozen brazier rhombexes spawn. The rhombexes target the player with the highest aggro in the room. Every 20 seconds while fighting the rhombexes, players in the west brazier suffer a bleed debuff. The best character for this room is a healer who can remove the bleed effect. Five waves of rhombexes spawn before the brazier door opens and you can return to the hub to defend the center spire.

North Brazier (5 waves)

As the spire appears in the north brazier, a solo combatant spawns. This is optimal for a DPS class with concentrated firepower. Defeating that mob triggers a second wave with two mobs. In this brazier room, monsters attack both the spire and the player. Watch for teams trying to divide your attention. The third wave has three mobs, and the fourth and fifth waves have—you guessed it—four and five mobs, respectively. After defeating the group of five in the fifth wave, the brazier door opens for access to the hub, where the fight continues.

East Brazier (5 waves)

As the spire appears in the east brazier, sloths and a spirit spawn to attack it. Area-of-effect attacks from the spirit and single-minded sloths mean you need to kill these mobs quickly. Are you used to fighting large groups? The east brazier is for you. Five waves spawn before the brazier door opens and you can return to the hub to help with the center spire.

South Brazier (1 boss)

In the south brazier, a single BAM spawns—the brazier commandant. Strong sweeping attacks from the commandant damage defender and spire alike. You need damage resistance in this brazier—it may only be one monster, but it could easily be the hardest of the four fights.

Lower Round Two: The Hub

Round two begins while the fight in the braziers continues. When a monster dies in each brazier, a stronger version spawns in the hub—so don’t leave this spire unattended! Someone has to stay here to keep the new waves under control. If you’re communicating with your other party members, you should know which monster you’re about to get. Again the goal is to protect the spire. If monsters destroy the central spire, the instance ends and you’re unable to reach the second stage.

As the other four players finish up their braziers, they should return to the center hub to help with the horde of new monsters. Once you’ve killed the center copy of the crucible commandant, you can progress to the next stage. Dako, the crucible dragon master, spawns after the commandant dies—but wait! Don’t fly out before everyone’s back in the center! Other monsters could still spawn in the center, and weaker players might not be able to get out by themselves. Talk to Dako to climb on a dragon and fly to the upper stage.

Stage Two: The Bower

Upon arriving at the Bower, you’ll see three baetyliths: Mark I, Mark II, and Mark III. Mark I baetyliths have less HP and power. They represent the easiest BAM challenge, while Mark III BAMs are devilishly hard. Choose the difficulty you think you can handle, then attack and destroy that baetylith to spawn your monster of choice. Each BAM comes with tier 14 loot. Your goal in this stage is to kill all four rounds of BAMs within the time limit.

Upper Round One: Vemoroth

Keep to the side! Vemoroth is a storm lizard with both a tail sweep and a breath attack. This BAM complicates the fight with a debuff that disorients your movement keys. When it drops below 50% HP, every minute it gains a cleansable buff that boosts its power and attack speed. While the buff doesn’t stack, it will refresh every minute—so watch for the on-screen warning and be ready to cleanse it.

Coin Intermission

In stage two, after each boss dies, gold coins rain down on you for one minute. Standing under a coin when it drops not only increases your points, but gives you a Gold Digger speed boost to grab more gold coins. After the coin fall is over, the next round’s baetyliths spawn.

The next round doesn’t start until you trigger it with a baetylith, so use this breather to deal with loot, strategy, or raising the dead. Don’t take too long—the instance timer keeps going.

Upper Round Two: Coelfacien

The coin fall was good practice for watching above you, and Coelfacien is a dracoloth with airborne attacks. Mostly, Coelfacien slams its tail and throws its body at the party. The airborne body slam attacks can completely wipe out players with low defenses.

Rounds two through four start off with a removable Harbinger of Futility debuff applied to one player. As long as that debuff is on any member of the party, the entire party is affected by a futility debuff that lowers everybody’s damage.

Upper Round Three: Maxillatumen

Maxillatumen also applies a Harbinger of Futility debuff to a party member at the start of battle. This BAM’s primary dangers are big AOE stuns and AOE damage. It spins around the room doling out hurt to anything too close.

Upper Round Four: Cyclops

The Cyclops is the ultimate challenge of the crucible. With more HP than any other BAM here, the Cyclops takes quite a bit of time to finish off. It focuses on the tank with a lot of fist slamming and rock smashing, but don’t think it’ll be easy on the rest of the party—that rock smash does an area-of-effect damage and stun. Plus, the Cyclops has a long-range burning eye beam.

Point Ranking

The Crucible of Flame is the first TERA dungeon to tally a point-based score. Dungeon rankings are tracked across the server, so PvE players can compare their prowess just like PvP players.

Killing each stage-one mob earns you 10 (for sloths) to 1,000 (for the commandant) points while losing a spire deducts 1,000 points. On any stage, a player death costs more than twice that many points.

But stage two is where the real points come in. Progress on these bosses earns you hundreds of points, and killing even the lowliest earns 5,000 points. The greater the difficulty, the greater the reward. In stage two, the Mark II bosses earn you three to four times the amount of points that their Mark I versions do. And Mark III bosses earn you four to six times the points of the Mark I bosses.

Once the Cyclops is defeated, leftover time increases your score.

Compare how you fared: current rankings appear on the Dungeon Rankings window found on Main Menu > Activities.

[Resource: http://tera.enmasse.com/game-guide/dungeons/crucible-of-flame ]