Keep Construct
Enrage: 10 minutes. When Enraged, Keep Construct will deal 200% more damage.
Tank: Toughness
Keep Construct heavily favors builds that deal high power damage due to its low Toughness compared to other raid bosses and its short burst phases. Additionally, throughout the fight Projections will spawn that must be quickly cleaved, further biasing the encounter toward burstier classes. Power Bladesworns, Soulbeasts, and Weavers are all common on this boss due to fitting exactly this profile, but any power DPS build is a viable pick.
While Keep Construct requires a Toughness tank, tanking is straightforward and can be done comfortably by most support builds.
- Low intensity
Axe & Axe
- Low intensity
Enabling the mote outside the arena activates the Down, Down, Downed achievement, which is Keep Construct’s “Challenge Mode” (with the associated extra weekly rewards).
The only difference with the achievement enabled is that the pulsing border that is present during the Exposed Core Phase will be active for the entire encounter instead. This does not change the approach to the fight in any way, so the following all still applies.
The encounter begins when players approach the center of the arena. The tank should remain against the edge and allow Keep Construct to approach them.
Keep Construct starts the fight with two stacks of
Projections
Known as: statue, adds
Two statues will light up, one on each half of the arena; the tank should bring Keep Construct to the nearest lit statue.
Projections will spawn from each lit statue and will fixate on two random players. These fixated players have two tasks: luring each projection on top of Keep Construct and keeping the two Projections from getting close to one another.
When a Projection dies near Keep Construct, it will remove one stack of
If two Projections get close to one another, they will stop all other movement and start walking toward each other in order to merge. If the two Projections are able to reach one another, they will combine into a bright red Insidious Projection, which has more health, does more damage and has a frontal smash attack that strips boons from the squad. Furthermore, killing the Insidious Projection near the boss will not remove a stack of
Generally, the close fixate should stand on the opposite side of Keep Construct from their Projection’s spawn point to make it walk into the boss and therefore the squad’s cleave damage. The far fixate should keep an eye on the first Projection’s health, pulling their Projection slightly off of the boss if the Projections are at risk of merging; once the first Projection is close to death, they can walk through Keep Construct to pull their fixate in as well.
Whenever the boss is free to move, it can choose between one of the following three mechanics at random. All three mechanics will be cancelled if the boss’s defiance bar is active and is broken in time.
Xera’s Fury
Known as: Spread
Every player will gain a light orange circle under their feet. When these detonate, each circle will damage any players standing within them for 20% of their maximum health. All players except for the fixates and the tank should spread for this mechanic.
Fixates should stay on Keep Construct to ensure that the Projections will not die far from Keep Construct. Additionally, if a Projection is pulled far from Keep Construct, squads will often struggle to re-target and kill it, making an Insidious Projection merge much more likely.
Attuned Phantasms
A large amount of Phantasms will spawn around the arena with red and white markers over their heads. If these phantasms are not killed in time, Keep Construct will do a massive attack, typically wiping the entire group.
Players will also gain the same red or white markers over their head, indicating which phantasms they can damage.
If this mechanic is chosen in the first two phases, many experienced squads will be able to reach Keep Construct’s defiance bar and break it before the phantasms are made to explode; players will have play this mechanic by ear.
Hail of Fury
In addition to the two random mechanics above, when under 33% HP remaining, Keep Construct will occasionally float into the sky and drop rubble onto the arena. The squad should treat this mechanic as though Keep Construct hasn’t moved—killing Projections where Keep Construct floated up from will still strip stacks of
Exposed Core Phase
Once Keep Construct’s bar has been broken, Keep Construct will retreat and three green circles will spawn on the arena. Each circle must have at least two players in it by detonation or the squad will wipe.
Groups will often assign supports to two of the circles while keeping all DPS players on the remaining circle. By assigning all DPS to one circle, the fixate can pull the Projection to the DPS group, allowing them to quickly kill it.
Remember if a support from the other two circles are fixated, one DPS player should react and switch places with the fixated Support, allowing them to pull the Projection to the DPS’s circle. If you don’t know who should switch places with the fixated support, take the initiative and be the one to swap.
After detonation, a pink Construct Core will appear in the middle of the arena. The arena will also gain a pink border and five Ley Rifts along the edge.
Pushing the Core
Known as: orb, pushing
For each Ley Rift the Construct Core passes through during this phase, Keep Construct will gain a stack of the
Keep Construct will respawn when the Orb is either pushed into the border of the arena or when one of the small Retriever Projections steal the Orb.
The Core can be pushed by any attack, but dedicated crowd control such as pushes, pulls, and launches will work as well. One player, usually a support, should be assigned to handle this mechanic, but other players can help if requested. If the support player has a pet (namely Rangers and Mechanists), make sure its AI is not auto-attacking the orb as pets are also able to push it.
The squad should aim to push through enough rifts to phase Keep Construct during the burn phase. Keep Construct phases at 66% and 33% HP remaining, so if the boss is near that health when the Core is exposed, only one rift should be necessary. If its health is far from these thresholds, more rifts should be captured: five rifts is always the safest bet, but groups with good damage can usually manage with three (or even less).
If at least one rift was captured when the Core is retrieved, upon respawning Keep Construct will be
Note: If Keep Construct is very close to one of the HP thresholds when leaving the burn phase, it’s often better to ignore the defiance bar if it appears and instead focus on getting its health over the line, since breaking the bar forces the squad to go through the entire Exposed Core phase again.
Magic Blast
At 66% and 33% HP remaining, Keep Construct will become invulnerable and will start channeling Magic Blast, a massive explosion that affects the entire squad. Players will gain red or white markers over their head, and red and white balls will move toward Keep Construct. Everyone should block balls matching their marker from reaching Keep Construct.
Each ball that reaches Keep Construct will give it a stack of
Players will take a small amount of damage when capturing each orb. If a player gets low on health, they should move close to the boss to be fixed up by the squad’s supports.
Typically, players should aim to spread out from other players with the same colored marker. Trust your teammates—you don’t need to run across Keep Construct to capture their orbs! Instead, focus on your section.
When the boss starts moving the group should restack to heal up from the blast and prepare for Phantasmal Blades.
Phantasmal Blades
Keep Construct will spawn both a glowing pink pool under its body and cone attacks in a radius around itself. The number of cones per cycle increases over the course of the encounter.
Sidestep the cones and avoid standing in the pool as it deals heavy damage and applies
Condition cleanses such as
At the end of Phantasmal Blades, two of the statues flanking the arena will light up as at the start of the encounter.
The entire squad should run to one of them (almost always the one on the eastern side), as Keep Construct will target a random player to leap on.
The squad then can
From this point forward, the fight proceeds exactly as it did at the start (with the exception of the Hail of Fury attack): the squad will need to cleanse the boss’s two stacks of