The gratuitous resistances and drastically shortened stun durations of the nightmare mode are a pain in the ass for everyday adventuring but they make fights with ranked enemies much more interesting, and so it is still a clear win. But the fun ended with Uldred and his abominations, very abruptly.
I started soloing him but gave up after a while when he had me in a Crushing Prison, because I realised that I was totally outgunned. The initial three abominations went down quickly enough, and I even managed to blow one of them up right in Uldred's face. But then I was out of mana, with only two normal lyrium potions (because I had forgotten to bring distillation agent) and a stack of lesser ones. Paralysis Explosion was surprisingly effective but things like Cone of Cold didn't stick long enough to be of any real use, if they weren't resisted in the first place. The converted abominations seem to be tougher; if they triple-strike while you are immobilised by Uldred's frost thingy and he is hammering away as well then things get very ugly, very fast. Not to mention Crushing Prison.
Anyway, so I decided to throw the whole party at Uldred and it was easy enough, basically a re-run of the Ishal ogre with a few twists.
Alistair had just turned 9 and so he could securely hold Uldred's attention by augmenting his pinpricks with Taunt. Without Taunt you have to let Alistair build up a bit of aggro before you can start nuking Uldred without danger of drawing him away from your tank. Thanks to Wynne, Alistair had no problems arising from being frozen or crushing-prisoned, as long as my mage was able to aggro abominations away from him pronto or just paralyse the whole shebang in order to give Wynne more time to heal up Alistair. Glyph of Warding was not as helpful as usual, with Alistair getting knocked off it or having to run around Uldred's back all the time.
I played the fight a couple of times in order to get the hang of it and to study it more closely.
Classic Ishal-style kiting and close-up melee tanking/kiting seemed equally viable; staying close to Uldred keeps him from casting spells unless he knocks you out of his threshold range, but kiting that way (instead of just tanking) requires constant attention, 100%. Should Uldred's freeze spell allow shattering then this would completely invalidate Ishal-kiting, of course, but I've never seen that happen.
Morrigan's Sleep spell was completely useless. I tried it about half a dozen times, and it was resisted by all of the enemies all of the time, without exception. Of course, her spell power was only half that of my mage warden, which makes this result kind of irrelevant. Morrigan's Force Field allowed emergency parking of Uldred when Alistair got hit with Crushing Prison and the glyphs were on cooldown, and it stuck most of the time (couldn't field Alistair because that would have prevented healing). In retrospect I should have used Force Field on a fully-healed Alistair whenever the spell was available, since he had Taunt to keep Uldred focussed. But I was concentrating on my mage.
Back to mages and soloing. Opening proceedings with a Paralysis Explosion worked reliably, since Uldred stands still for a second or two at the beginning. Uldred stays paralysed long enough for you to take out the three initial abominations, even if you have to kite one or two of them into place before applying Cone of Cold. Follow up with Flame Blast and Fire Ball, and there shouldn't be too much left to mop up (especially if you were lucky and one of your bombs stuck).
Cone of Cold seems to fail less often than (Virulent) Walking Bomb, so there is a good chance that you can freeze all four of the buggers in your gambit. Conversely, the chance that the critter who resists the coning is also one who failed to get paralysed is fairly slim. The bomb spells seem to fail more often than the official nightmare enemy spell resist of 5% would indicate. One stubborn bugger resisted three bombs in a row, after all the work of kiting him close to Uldred and freezing him there twice. That's a chance of 1:8000 if the 5% is correct, but it seemed more like 10% at the very least.
All mages except for Irving die in any case, so one might as well keep the Litany of Andralla in reserve for Irving (who was always the third to be offered Uldred's 'gift' in all my playthroughs). Intervals between conversions seem to vary wildly. Sometimes two of them are going on simultaneously, and you can stop only one of them despite the short cooldown on the litany. All the more reason to keep it in reserve for Irving.
Uldred spams Anti-Magic Ward, and he seems impervious to Glyph of Neutralisation (which is otherwise a cheap but effective way to make ranked or bossy mages manageable). This makes me think that Mana Clash has an equally low chance. This leaves only close-up kiting as a way of preventing spell casting, which is not something that mages tend to excel at.
Coming more or less straight from Lothering, available looted mage kit gives +27 defence. That is not a whole lot if it comes on top of nothing at all. With Glyph of Warding somewhat ineffective and Heroic Defence not available (level 10 - my toon hasn't even got all the urgently needed spells) there is no way to avoid getting hit a lot except by using the dexterity of the player as a substitute for that of the toon.
However, if you are running circles around Uldred then you cannot keep plugging him with your staff, which is otherwise a fairly efficient way of whittling him down if you play with a party (especially with three staves firing at the same time). That leaves only Cone of Cold and Paralysis Explosion as openers to do serious damage to Uldred, which could take quite a while indeed.
Killing the two bonus abominations while kiting the big beast seems a rather daunting proposition under these circumstances, since they seem to take a lot more work than the initial three.
Has anyone found a good strategy for a mage soloing Uldred? Apart from bombs and traps, I mean?
Modifié par DarthGizka, 18 février 2014 - 11:17 .
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