Dungeon crawling involves more than just the one place. But that dont matter to you.
Until you learn pathing, fearing is fraught with danger. But you know this already.
Troll by character, troll by nature.
Kudos.

Putting aside the talk about the usefulness of Blood Ember armor for dungeon soloing, BE armor does have another very real benefit that hasn't been mentioned: it allows an SK to indefinitely sustain a Monk style power level by FDing mana-free with the greaves. And you can even snare with the gauntlets to keep the mob from fleeing while the powerlevelee finishes it off. To be fair, an Iksar with enough FT and Clarity/PoTG could probably sustain a decent PL with castable FD. But having it available on the Greaves makes it a hell of a lot easier.

Almost every zone you can fear kite at the entrance. Try that crap in Disco, lol. Yes killing something fearable using fear is more efficient, I didn’t think we had to prove this one.

The dungeon crawl with a melee is a painful concept. With slower kills and slower repops the justification for the “less efficient” route is obvious. You bypass the crap you don’t want to kill. You snare the one thing you do want to kill so it doesn’t run off. You burn all your mana on taps and med for another repop hoping for a named spawn.

Most people with really good gear don’t need to fear kite. They CAN, they just don’t need to. Plus at some point some of the things you want to kill aren’t fearable or reliably so. A -200 check lifetap will certainly land.

I guess again for lack of established definitions the argument is over “crawl” or even “dungeon”. To flop past rubbish or if the OP was talking about camping the Ghoul Assassin in lguk. I guess we will never know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI_IJ_F1GCY - This was me making my way down to disco with a mix of fear kiting and face tanking. Didn't get all the way due to not FDing a DoT when I should have, but you can clearly see it's doable. I'll see about doing a disco specific video next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJwu-fFy0dk - Pint and I did a small test to see how much damage we took face tanking. Thank you for taking the time Pint!

Kongfuzi Level = 60
Kongfuzi HP = 4362
Kongfuzi AC = 1434
Kongfuzi MP = 2246

Bazgek Level = 59
Bazgek HP = 2864
Bazgek AC = 1080
Bazgek MP = 2018

Opponents: https://wiki.project1999.com/Mentrax_Mountainbone and https://wiki.project1999.com/Eldak_Howlingbear

Parse 1: Kongfuzi Damage Taken: 2405 over 133 seconds = 18 DPS
Parse 2: Kongfuzi Damage Taken: 2559 over 108 seconds = 23.7 DPS
Average = 20.85 DPS

Parse 1: Bazgek Damage Taken: 2,892 over 129 seconds = 22.4 DPS
Parse 2: Bazgek Damage Taken: 3,547 over 143 seconds = 24.8 DPS
Average = 23.6 DPS

Kongfuzi's damage was reduced by: ~12%

Due to the small number of parses, this is not a true average, just a guesstimate.

Pint was definitely impressive with his 4k HP and Vulak Axe. As you can see, the damage reduction is noticeable. However, you are still taking a couple thousand damage per fight.

An SK can mitigate 390 per minute via regen with Troll/Iksar Regen + Aura of Battle + Fungi + Ring 10.
An SK can mitigate 500 per minute on average via Epic.
An SK can mitigate 100 per minute on average via Shroud of Death/Undeath.

The average fight was ~2 minutes, so you could mitigate ~2000 damage per kill. That leaves ~400-500 Damage on the table, which is the equivalent of 1.5 Life Taps, or 337 mana.

In my opinion it looks like Blood Ember for FD and Fear Kiting is still a good option to save HP/Mana, even at 60 with full raid gear. These two giants we are fighting are only level 50, so higher level mobs that are still fearable will be doing more damage.

Wow, didn’t realise the SK epic had so much impact compared to everything else an SK has :o

Yeah Epic is quite nice, SKs need all the self healing they can get.

Sk epic is game changing. Looks awesome too. By far my favorite epic.

I'm not sure how anyone can argue otherwise. Even BiS tank gear obviously can't compete with a spell combo (Fear/snare) that reduces your damage taken to literally zero.

That being said, fear kiting on a melee is annoying AF, so I can understand why people wouldn't want to do it even if it is the most efficient soloing strategy. Much easier to just face tank with lifetaps, then AFK between kills while medding with Fungi.

Agreed. With 400-500 damage left unmitigated you can spend 1-2 minutes meditating or spamming BP click, kind of like a Paladin with Deepwater BP at that point hehe. Certainly a valid style of play if you are too lazy to fear kite.

Slam helped a lot with this annoyance. I learned to enjoy it after awhile because it opened up some options without needing to afk forever to regen health or click the slow bp. Another thing is to just fear at like 40-50%. The mob won’t be moving as fast at this point eventually coming to a complete stop which makes it more tolerable. Having a max/2nd max pet was also a game changer at 52 & 58.