Hell sure takes a pounding in The Secret World. I think it’s a little weary of losing its status as a frightening vacation locale and being treated as a playground to a neverending swarm of tourists from Earth who keep shooting and slashing the heck out of the residents.

I joined up with Massively’s MJ and a few of her friends to run Hell Raised on nightmare mode last night, because why not? Mama needs the loot and nightmare mode experience.

It was actually a pretty good run, all things considered. We had a very experienced tank and healer at our disposal, and that covered for our noobishness and weaker gear. None of the bosses presented too much of a challenge — I think we had maybe four wipes total among all of them — at least until the end. On the second boss I got a really awesome new purple head DPS talisman which erases the mistake I made a long time ago of selecting a purple health head talisman from the Last Train to Cairo final reward. Between that and my new shotgun, my purples have started to outnumber my blues and I’m seeing an increase in my effectiveness.

I ran a strike build last night that I kept tweaking. I love shotgun dearly, although I truly wish it had a slightly longer range.

Anyway, the run was terrific right up until we hit Machine Tyrant, that awful (yet incredible-looking) final boss that features reflective bubbles and shooter hell in the form of constant bombings and roving crosshair attacks. He’s nasty even on elite mode, and in nightmare, he’s… well, you get the idea.

We struggled a lot with him, because one wrong step and you’re dead — and if one person goes, there goes the fight. He enrages after a few minutes if you can’t get him down fast enough, so four people really can’t take him. Other than doing DPS my job was to purge a nasty condition that he put on us.

It’s a fight that requires just a whole heck of a lot of fancy footwork, situational awareness, and sheer luck. It made me think of the other night in Guild Wars 2 when I was running a dungeon and someone was saying how challenging that was. I choked back a laugh and said, “Mister, if you haven’t done TSW, you don’t know what challenging is. This is cakewalk in comparison.”

The one PUG guy in our group wasn’t as patient as the rest of us, although he might have been more experienced, and he started getting frustrated at what he saw as lower-than-acceptable DPS. I don’t think he was being mean about it, but he was asking us all a lot about our hit rating, which I guess was not up to par. I’ll admit that I did notice that I was glancing too much and that I have a few holes in my gear that could use a glyph or signet. But hey, it was a learning run, and even though we didn’t make it through, we had a good time, got some gear, and took some lessons away for the future.

My next step is to do a shopping trip in London. I have some black bullion that I might be able to convert into another purple piece, and I should definitely make sure that all of my gear is signeted/glyphed up.

P.S. — I’m going to be doing some reading-up on nightmare runs and builds as well. This thread seems particularly helpful for us DPS types.