Getting spiked down at ToS as T1

This doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes when I'm at ToS I'll suddenly get spiked down from around 25% health even with Armor of Earth up and full infiltrators (I've used both a blunt and piercing shield here and have been spiked with both of them). I was running Finish Him as my optional.

Any idea how to avoid this? The only thing I can think of would be to run Mental Block or Unseen Fury over Finish Him, but that would slow the run down (e.g. I would need to aggro a berserker group for menzies).

If you're running Finish Him then you either need to use some Pcons (one of cc or apple at the least) or try and time sliver so that it is up when iau is down, giving you more blocking when you are weak. The nature of the foes means that if you are unlucky and they chain their skills while your iau is down then they can take you down if you dont have a high amount of health or some other defense.

powershot ftw.....try to avoid low health, especially when iau is down, crushing blow is destructive in this case^^

One of the things that took me a year to figure out into my speed clearing experience is that you need to cast shroud as often as you can because I finally found what my problem was. You need to constantly be casting shroud every time that it is available for an increased damage reduction, this makes a HUGE difference. It has also been noted on the wiki that it is a glitch with shadow form. Millions upon billions of speed clearers will suggest to you to do all these neat little tricks you have to be spending 50k in pcons each time you go, or it has to be the 13th of march and the sun needs to be shining in Denver, everyone will suggest these stipulations, but the afore mentioned is legitimate and I had to do some serious digging to find this issue, hope it helps.

If you're dying, change your build. Don't take FH, take Mental Block instead until you feel comfortable with how ToS is going, then try FH again.

I use finish him, don't take mental block unless you really cant live without it. Power shot is armor-ignoring so it doesn't matter how high your armor is. The fact is you cannot tank all of the rangers at once, it's not possible.

When i T1reg I kill the first 1-2 groups of abyssal and before I aggro anymore abyssal i make sure to kill 3 rangers or so. Do not attempt to tank all of the rangers, kill a few before you aggro more mobs.

MB unless you really going for speed - an extra 1:30 doesnt mean much