Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today! For those unfamiliar with Team Antelope, please introduce yourself and maybe tell us your favorite Shine Boss.

MAIDENLESS. I play Awakening Dosa, but I was a Succession Guardian main in the past. Deposed Crown Prince. 

Hallo, I'm Quiw, a Succession Ninja enjoyer and part-time Awakening Dosa enjoyer. Deposed Crown Prince for sure. 

I'm Avaachen, I mainly play Awakening Witch and Shai. In general, my favorite boss is Deposed Crown Prince but when it comes to time pushing, I prefer Bihyung, since there is less randomness involved. 

Hey! I’m Asuhja — I main Lahn and my favorite shrine boss so far is the Deposed Crown Prince. Looking forward to seeing what more bosses Pearl Abyss will bring to the table in the future

Hey, I'm Coronam- Succession Witch main and lovin Deposed Crown Prince.

Team Antelope is a unique name and I love the branding! Could you tell me a little bit about the origins?

During the Heroes of Hwanghae event one of the patterns the Blue-clad Youth did during the mirror reminded Maidenless of a giraffe. We were talking about that quite a bit for some reason. Then we needed a short callout for one of the mechanics Prince does, while we were learning it, so I suggested calling it giraffe. After that, everything was a giraffe, even our video Thumbnail. For this event, we went with Antelope for some reason, since two of the giraffe members were not available. 

We wanted to keep a safari-themed name since on a safari you encounter "the big five"...

What are u waffling rn 😂

Ok I'll not use ChatGPT this time. We took antelopes because they are cute and jumpy 😂

How often do you run black shrine bosses? Do you prefer solo or group shrine content?

Both once per week most likely but helpin out if someone needs me.

I usually run party shrine bosses twice a week—once with the guild and once with friends. I also end up doing the Crown Prince multiple times if anyone needs help. Before most of my grind sessions, I’ll do a quick Sangoon run on Arsha for that drop buff. I enjoy both solo and group content equally, but I’ve gotta admit, the solo ones can be a bit rough on the nerves sometimes 😄

For me it varies a lot, but I usually do 5 Prince clears, since I'm also helping other groups and then do 3 other group bosses. I would likely enjoy group bosses more in general, but except for Prince and Blue-clad Youth, there isn't much to do except for DPS. Because of that, I hope we will get another higher-difficulty boss at some point. I also do the solo bosses, but currently, you lose too much silver, if you do one, that doesn't have C8-10 yet.

Never miss a clear & usually I help people out, especially with Prince, on average I probably do 3 - 5 Princes per week + a couple of random bosses x amount of times (if we're pushing for times). Solo bosses, I can run a lot if I am motivated to beat a time / or there is actual competition 🫡 Prefer group bosses for sure, especially if they take some skill

I mainly run the party bosses together with our guild group (Coronam, Asuhja, Schlieri, and Khviftwqtz). We Usually run once where we try to aim for rank 1 every week if everyone finds time. I often help out others for a quick clear as well. doing a lot of prince runs with others too if I find time. the solo shrines on the other hand - I just do c8-c10 on one class and keep the other 2 open for eventual server buffs. I really wish we could enter more than 5 bosses per week, and thats for both group and solo shrines - I wouldn't mind not getting rewards for clears beyond 5 🙂

Wow! That's dedication. Since as a group you run a lot of Party Black Shrine bosses, which would say has the easiest and hardest mechanics to learn? Especially for all the newbies wondering about this content. 

Easiest mechanics overall: I’d say Bulgasal or Jigwi — the more DPS your group has, the easier they become since you can just skip a bunch of mechanics. Hardest mechanics overall: Definitely the Crown Prince. He’s tough, but once you learn the patterns and get used to the fight, he becomes consistently clearable.

Easiest mechanics overall: If you have high DPS, you can skip every mechanic of Uturi. Otherwise, it's likely Bulgasal. 
Hardest mechanics overall: It should be Deposed Crown Prince, but depending on the other players it can also be Blue-clad Youth.

If you only look at mechanics: (easiest to hardest)
Jigwi → Bulgasal → Bihyung → Bonghwang → Uturi → Blue-Clad → Prince 

Honestly, it's tough to say, because with our current AP levels most of the bosses just get one-shot with little to no effort — maybe with the exception of Prince. Thinking back to first time clears id say: Bulgasal easiest, prince hardest.

Easiest mechanics overall:  Uturi.
Hardest mechanics overall: It is Deposed Crown Prince

Interesting difference of opinions! It looks like Deposed Crown Prince seems to be the hardest to master for a newer player. That makes me wonder - for this leaderboard, did you do anything in particular to prepare for the speed run aspect? And how did you decide who would be your teammates?

We coordinated time slots that worked for everyone and prepped every possible AP buff we could get our hands on. We also planned the boss runs in sync with our guilds, BugCat and Demise, to take advantage of node war benefits ahead of time. As for the team, we have a specific group of well-geared players lined up for these runs, but due to a few absences, it ended up being just the five of us available in the end.

We theorized a lot about how we could improve some of the bosses, especially on Bihyung we learned a few new things. Originally we already created Team Giraffe for the previous Heroes of Hwanghae event. Back then I asked Maidenless, if he wanted to do the event with me and both of us brought some guild mates into the group. Since some of our old team members were unable to participate this time, we got Asuhja and Quiw as a replacement. At this point, we had already done bosses together quite often, so it was not much of a change team play-wise.

There's also the prep part ensuring the most optimal: crystals, addons, buffs & node war buff. I just like pushing times and trash numbers so got included for the ride 🫡

Shout out to the best GM and Alliance leader in the entire game, ElPapu, for getting us node war buffs every Friday.

That's a good point. Do you mind listing all of the buffs you remember taking to clear the event? 

[Party] Harmony Draught - Human, Perfume of Deep Sea or Perfume of Courage, Church Buffs (AP/DP), Simple Cron Meal, optimized crystals, and Carolin buff depending on the boss. 

For Prince, we went nuke-mode and went Immortal versions to be able to sacrifice our lives for damage if we could skip a mechanic. Human damage crystals for highest damage efficiency.

Do you feel like all classes are viable to run the bosses, or do you have to run certain classes to clear them?

Yeah, I do think every class is viable for shrine bosses when played well—if you’re not focused purely on min-maxing clear times. Some classes could use a few tweaks, and others have some trouble with iframe consistency, but overall, they all bring something to the table. Personally, I really like having a Shai in the party for group content and Dosa can work wonders too.

We actually already cleared Deposed Crown Prince on all classes, so yes they work for that. When it comes to pushing for times, some classes might not be good enough though. For example, if I didn't play Shai, I would have had to play on my Mystic, since Awakening Witch was too weak before it got buffed recently. 

All classes are definitely viable to clear it, and recently more classes are viable in terms of doing good damage. But there is still a certain hierarchy in terms of class DPS if you want to have optimal times. Black shrine bosses typically favor high burst classes as any downtime is prone to favor classes with high DPS + long CD skills, which wouldn't get reflected at most grind spots. Also obviously Shai and Dosa make a big difference for party content because of party buffs, Shai being insanely important, and Dosa less so.

If you want just do bosses - you can run all classes even without Shai, Prince will just be a challenge. We accidentally ran Prince once without Shai buffs. If you want to min-max speedrun: you really want to have Shai + Dosa + Witch/Wizard + 2 burst classes in my opinion. 

For Deposed Crown Prince, you recorded the fastest time of 6m 43s, which was a minute faster than North America, and a full 6 minutes faster than the next European team. Could you talk a bit about your personal roles for Deposed Crown Prince and why you think you cleared it so fast?

I think we hit the good pulls and strats for Crown Prince during that run. Our team comp, synced playstyles and a bit of RNG helped us skip some mechanics entirely. The biggest factor, though, was consistent damage output across the board—and a bit of luck landing the right animation windows at the right time. Most things just clicked that run.

But to get to the questions, I think we're simply more comfortable getting the most out of our classes at Prince, which comes from a lot of experience, and putting effort into optimization. We still had runs close to a 6-minute pace which we didn't get because of the RNG aspect related to the boss' choice of skill-animations which are based on multiple factors and which inherently seem pseudo-random.

We had people assigned to certain clones during that phase, but other than that I'm not sure if we really have roles for the boss. If I had to decide on a role, I think I do calls on what to do from time to time. I think the main reason we were fast, is that we have a lot of experience by now. Ever since our first clear last year, we've always done at least two classes per week. At times I even did five classes in a week to get the titles faster. There is still room for improvement time wise though. We sadly did a bit too much damage before the 20% mechanic of phase 3, we call it giraffe, and because of that, we couldn't skip the 6 end jumps, which cost us about 30 seconds. 

We all had to maintain high DPS in order to skip attacks, we had to play close to each other so the Prince wouldn't randomly tp on the other side of the map. He also had to be kept in a "goldy lock zone" so he doesn't dance himself out of bounds and trigger a jump mechanic. Also, this allowed us to move more comfortably between the inner and outer moons. As a Dosa, I had to make sure that all the elemental reaction buffs were constantly running to provide more DPS as well as more sustain and tankiness to the team. I theorized the boss to have an internal "rage" meter, that fills up the more we damage him, which would cause him to attack more eradically which we call "breakdance" - this would allow us to skip phase 2 from 60% hp down to 0%

I think I need to learn my class more instead of button-mashing! This was so informative! Thank you 🙏