47 réponses à ce sujet

[ottffsse]

nightmare, inquisitor is lvl25 (party lvl 25. No heal on hit/kill beyond death siphon, as I do not have those matts and never really tried them. 71 base dmg staff, 152 base dmg bow, maximizing crit% and crit dmg bonus%. both charecters do have +5 guard on hit, and Sera has 10% fade cloak, inquisitor 10% Walking Fortress mats on weapons/armours. I piloted the tempest to utilise elixers correctly.

[Cydh]

Is that a challenge? Can I try with my Warrior? Pretty please?

 

I never tried to two-men content. My latest 4-men on this particular fight took 8 minutes, so a bit more than twice as fast, but I suspect it would take much more with only two peeps. Good job, and some nasty close calls, congratulations on surviving the heart attack when you were fumbling with the tactic view and the bruisers

 

How long did it take to clear everything up to there?

 

(and in particular, how many wipes on the three stealthy rogue elites?)

 

...damn I just realized you need a mage to make the potion table. Which makes my plan for a Warrior/Cassandra run a bit more difficult

 

Edit: 1h05 minutes to reach the Gurd fight checkpoints with full potions. Warrior/Cassandra ftw. Damn that was hard. I need a break before I take on that Beast of a fight you just posted. And I kinda regret not having a specialization, those additional dispels would have helped me tons

[ottffsse]

Up to there was not that bad and I got better as I progressed and got used to the new enemy tactics and what to do against them. Enemy archers, stalkers, and mages were all serious business, as I only speced into Dispel in the Gurd fight. But they were all manageable considering I was fighting in the open landscape and wall of fire is so amazing at disrupting the enemy anywhere.

I wanted to play the expansion with two characters as I have always found the nightmare difficulty (post skyhold) not so nightmare. I was very surprised at starting out on the dlc that battles were really tougher, but I respeced, fine-tuned and adapted my tactics. Also I did this runthrough with two characters to focus on the basics: therefore I have the necro mage for unit control and support, and the tempest for the extra damage boost. In a full party you would have more "firepower" (dps) to finish fights quicker but the fundamentals would not change. Maybe if you run a melee oriented party, but even there you'd have to have a "tank" to substitute for mage crowd control.

The Gurd battle is the toughest, considering the confined space, the relative high health of the enemies and their moves against you. The end boss fight of Hakkon was really much easier in comparison. Playing this Tempest and Necro I do not have any chance of failing the final boss fight unless I am sleep-walking. In this Gurd battle, in real time, I only clear about 25% of the time. (Of course overuse of pause/tac cam is a different matter and I only used it here to revive when going into Sera's bullet time, as I did not want to miss it with a bad revive aim). I also set up one combo in tac-cam once I realized Sera's Thousand Cuts was available. There was several close calls especially towards the end when I was cornered against the wall and he was going at me - there I gave step-by-step commands as I could not risk that going into stealth would not guarantee that I can pass through enemies unharmed (sometime their random swings can still hurt me). That said you should notice also that in principle, if Gurd was alone, the necro could tank him - she was mostly downed when overwhelmed with the additional adds + Gurn, as Sera was trying to "kill an archer" asap, or something like that.Plus the ai necro saved Sera's a*s several times in 1.) casting barrier, especially one amazinggly times one towards the end. 2.)Static cage actually disrupted Gurd's 'ice grip/ fade step to you' attack. Necro was my crowd controller and tank and this allowed the archer to operate with less interferance.EDIT: *Actually at least one death on the necro was caused by increased barrier decay through flask of lighning*

I can imagine a warrior class that can generate guard quickly to be good in this fight but under one condition: you also should have good dps output other wise you won't kill stuff fast enough as 1.)it has lots of hp, 2.) has some form of nasty unblockable attack it will use sooner or later. Then again, abilities which have both an agressive element and some form of control mixed in (charging bull being the classic example) would be most useful. Upgraded Warhorn?

If you have good cold resistence gear you don't need the potion tables.

Poison arrows are really nasty, taking on 4 spellbinders at once can get really nasty really fast (it looks easy in the video but it is because I can spam dispel (bye bye barrier), wall of fire (run in fear), full draw+knowckout powder (go to sleep little birdie).

Before this fight those three stalkers near the entrance really victimized Sera, and I chose to keep the necro alive there. That section I used the necro alone to deal with them. The rest of the enemies melted to wall of fire + bullet time /flask of fire+long shot. Yeah getting to Gurd from the entrace though probably easily 40 minutes, but it's nice, it feels like your playing in real time.

I am no KE expert but I wonder which class can solo this fight at lvl 23-25 with no cheese tactics (necro auto revive etc).

[Tharkun]

Hmm, so Immortal Necros are cheese but KE barrier games aren't?  I have been playing with an immortal necromancer using the berserk masterwork and the 1% heal on hit.  Revive after Simulacrum isn't automatic, it requires timing the 10 second expiration and making sure you have damage going out then.  Also I wouldn't want to solo as an immortal necromancer since even momentary dying leads to a "continue/load/quit" prompt.  And there are times that I am running Dorian due to death and then see my Inquisitor stand up.

 

I didn't buy the DLC yet as my rerolling has prevented me from finishing the game so far.  I might try a necromancer duo though.  That could be hilarious.

[Deebo305]

I swear thosd goddam brutes are wiping my party

Then thing just get even worse when Gurd rears his ugly head Reminds of Golems of Amagorokk from Origin...that goddam Harvester

[Bayonet Hipshot]

The new DLC is very unfriendly to Champions and Knight Enchanters. The rest should be just fine if they have Evade / Fade Step / Army Roll. 

[Cydh]

Thanks for the write-up, it's really appreciated.

 

Playing with two characters is certainly exciting. Cassandra has always been my favourite teammate, so she had to be first in line. I had to plan my potion use to be able to make it through the temple, but the first step was of course the three elite assassins. It was a very random fight but extremely spectacular that I only got on the fourth try. I think it's possible to cheese it by fighting with your back against a wall now that I think about it.

 

I had to gulp eleven potions on this fight alone, and had only one left for the three archers + bruiser in the courtyard. That's when I started to use advanced pulling tactics. I had to, no more mark of the rift, no more pots. So I would pull them one by one, using improved war horn to try to keep them in check.

 

Right on the money with improved war horn, by the way. This skill is delirious. Each cast hits all enemies in an 8 yards radius with four effects (sunder, weaken, panic, damage and guard break), and it certainly looks like each of these effects applies a chance to proc a masterwork. It's my little warrior's ranged attack of sorts. It's very slow though. The slowest attack animation that I know of. Most bruisers can kill you before it's finished unless you cast it before they're in range

 

I didn't expect it, but the deadliest enemy by far though for my little team during the trash clearing was the protector/shield bearer (didn't take note of their name), their raging bull + sword hit was a certain kill on full guard if I couldn't evade or block one of these. I'm happy overall that I managed to clear everything with a single potion recharge and without using any elixir/regen/bomb. It means I'll finally be able to unleash the full power of the warrior pair for the final fight (and die horribly and repeatedly).

 

This morning I spent an hour working on the Gurd fight, and I took him to 75% on the first (and so far only) time I actually reached him. The problem is the bruisers - they take me an insane amount of time to kill (about 8min) because I can't find any strategy that would beat plain and simple guerrilla warfare, and let's say warriors aren't the fastest at that job. For that matter I also found out to my dismay that the Panick effect from War Horn has diminishing returns, after a few applications they become immune :'(

 

For the mages I get the feeling it boils down to sheer luck, whether I can kill the first one before he barriers up and we're out of dispels. I haven't found a method to do that reliably yet. When I did though, dealing with the remaining three was "easy".

 

As for Gurd, the first thing I noticed is that what four flasks of bees do, two flasks of bees don't (ie take care of all the undead). This guy is definitely going to be a ******. You spoke of guard breaking skills, isn't that simply the poison from the undead archers?

 

Anyway it's a great challenge!

[Cydh]

Hmm, so Immortal Necros are cheese but KE barrier games aren't?  I have been playing with an immortal necromancer using the berserk masterwork and the 1% heal on hit.  Revive after Simulacrum isn't automatic, it requires timing the 10 second expiration and making sure you have damage going out then.  Also I wouldn't want to solo as an immortal necromancer since even momentary dying leads to a "continue/load/quit" prompt.  And there are times that I am running Dorian due to death and then see my Inquisitor stand up.

 

I didn't buy the DLC yet as my rerolling has prevented me from finishing the game so far.  I might try a necromancer duo though.  That could be hilarious.

 

Honestly I don't think this was intended as a snipe towards the OPness of a class/spec. In that kind of challenge you need all the help you can get. I've been exploiting the quirks of the AI like crazy and even then it's still crazy hard by my standards.

 

In the DLC, mobs kill you in one mistake. You're routinely taking crossfire for 1000+ damage. The largest single hit I had to soak was for 6800 physical. A KE's barrier game helps, but it's definitely not enough to let you solo, you need all the cheese you can get. The Necro is powerful but not because of the autorevive, rather because of the insane amount of crowd control they can unleash even after they were taken down. Again, it won't save them in those fight without great skills to back it up.

[ottffsse]

Yeah, my only familiarity with HoK on necromancers that it is inconsistent and timing "dumb luck" is crutial. That is why I generally prefer good old guard generation on hit+fade cloak/ walking fortress for survivability.

my own self critique here is that I do use the necro here more as a "general" support mage and one can definately (in a more full party of 4 characters) use the specs "signiture" abilities horror/similicrum more.

basically as I stated it all comes down to two elements: 1.) crowd/unit control disabling/debuffs and dps output. That is why it seemed to me when doing a duo run a mage and a rogue would be the best choice.Even then, it took all I had and some luck to this fight and survive that last wave.

With two warrior you will have to balance those two things in a new way so you have a chance.

with brutes: I guess try to play defensively/ kite and unleash dps on them whenever your super templar combo (wrath of heaven/ spell purge) comes off cooldown.War horn them only at the beginning and after a dispel to make sure they are debuffed and primed for war horn.

With the spellbinders, I would if I was playing a warrior try to charge bull into them before they generate barrier and then unleash war horn to panic them. And do the templar combo. Don't aggro the spellbinders before you take out the brutes, that is a bad idea (I could still take on two brutes and 4 spellbinders at once and took care of them in several attemps with the mage and tempest but that is because I could dispel/wall of fire on a regular basis). Even than that would make the first part harder and would result in the necro or sera going down at least once and me having to revive her, using up precious heal pots etc).

I learned of war horns great effectiveness in multiplayer where I play reaver a lot there. There you need it to be really effective on the highest difficulty.

Try to have Cass draw aggro while you operate from the flank.

In the main fight put your more survivable character on Gurd and have the other one which hopefully deals more dps deal with the adds when they pop up and keep reviving. Not sure how easy that will be without some fall back plan (on necro I always had at least barrier/similicrum to ensure I could revive Sera if she falls, and on Sera stealth/ flask of lightning to revive the necro). I am curious at how much the poison arrows will damage your guard as they almost destroyed me.

I respeced the necro mage to use dispel extra for this fight, before I was running ice mine/armour (destroys stalkers). I run around thedas with like 10 tactician's ammulets in my inventory lol.

[Cydh]

I didn't think to carry around these amulets. It would have been handy.

 

The poison arrows simply ignores guard and damages the health bar directly. It's as deadly as it sounds without barriers.

 

I'm actually pondering ignoring Gurd for most of the fight - his damage seems quite low all things considered compared to the poison - and having my duo focus on killing adds as they pop.

 

Thanks for the tips!

[ottffsse]

I didn't think to carry around these amulets. It would have been handy.
 
The poison arrows simply ignores guard and damages the health bar directly. It's as deadly as it sounds without barriers.
 
I'm actually pondering ignoring Gurd for most of the fight - his damage seems quite low all things considered compared to the poison - and having my duo focus on killing adds as they pop.
 
Thanks for the tips!

are you using crit builds to take advantage of flow of battle and reduce cooldown times? that might also really help. + blessed blades on cass.

[Cydh]

are you using crit builds to take advantage of flow of battle and reduce cooldown times? that might also really help. + blessed blades on cass.

 

I do have the two-hander cooldown on crit passive. I'm using the amulet that reduces cooldowns (15%), and as a result my warrior is stamina capped (cooldowns come back faster than stamina). Cassandra would need a respec to be able to consistently pop her combo as well, as I put exactly zero thoughts in her build.

 

I'm discovering a new playstyle and I need to unlearn everything, it's exciting

[Cydh]

I did it! I litterally just did it. Sixth try overall. I decided to give it two tries tonight before considering a respec and a rerun of all the trash cleaning, and on the second try lo and behold, everything went okay. One super close call required me to pulse a regen potion tick from Cassandra to revive my warrior, but overall it went really well.

 

What pushed it over the edge was that I simply removed the taunt skills from our skill bars because I should have realized they were the most useless thing in the entire world, added for the first time in the whole expansion the Aegis of the Rift skill, and let nature do its thing. Raging Bull generates way enough guard anyway. We assist-trained all the undead archers together asking them if they have a ladder to get their boss off our back, then we spammed THE BEES, to take care of the assassins, and finally we split up, I soloed the two bruisers on one side of the area while Cassandra was playing a different type of tennis with Gurd, much like your Inquisitor did.

 

It was a far slower kill than yours (25 minutes) but most of it is a rather slow and uninteresting game of cat and mouse with the first two bruisers which I could speed up if only I bothered learning to play with the tactical view. I'll have a video up soon (as soon as I get all the encoding out of the way). Thanks a TON ottffsse for both inspiring me to do this and for all the tips you provided. I feel like I'm part of a very small club now

[Biotic Flash Kick]

in before assassin nightmare solo within 50 seconds via offense tonic and fade touched mats

[Deebo305]

Finally took this bastard down Didn't utilize Wall of Fire so much before now but keeping the Hakkonite mobs running aroumd like chickens with their heads cut off made life easier and constant Dispells and Spell Purges from Dorion,Cass, amd my Inquisitors kept them mages down

As for Gurd, hes tough but not a true problem until more Hakkonites run in which happens when hes about 60-75% done, once they were swarming my party a Teir 3 MotR, Static Cage and Elemental Mine rekted em good

[ottffsse]

the game on nightmare was easy anough as is and I never really got the tier 3 focus perk to do massive damage with thousand cuts / + fully upgraded mighty offensive tonics. I am sure if you really do all that and max crit damage to like 200% (through medium armour) and crit chance to 80-90% you can do this in half the time. it is also true should you be able to just take gurd down quickly the adds will auto die.

but if you do all that it just means you eventually look to download custom tactics mods and such things to make nightmare harder, which just means enemies have more hp /more resistence and damage, but the groundwork tactics remain the same. I know what you are talking about : hidden blades x5 + hidden blades x4 + 1% HoHit or +5 Guard.

Of course if they ever bothered with PvP assassin archers would dominate because they could hit anything from stealth and range with full draw for 12000K+ initial damage. try surviving that. though tempest archers would only do 7000K+ initial damage but could immediately go into flask of lightning bullet time afterwards. I am not even going to talk about thousand cuts.
 

I did it! I litterally just did it. Sixth try overall. I decided to give it two tries tonight before considering a respec and a rerun of all the trash cleaning, and on the second try lo and behold, everything went okay. One super close call required me to pulse a regen potion tick from Cassandra to revive my warrior, but overall it went really well.
 
What pushed it over the edge was that I simply removed the taunt skills from our skill bars because I should have realized they were the most useless thing in the entire world, added for the first time in the whole expansion the Aegis of the Rift skill, and let nature do its thing. Raging Bull generates way enough guard anyway. We assist-trained all the undead archers together asking them if they have a ladder to get their boss off our back, then we spammed THE BEES, to take care of the assassins, and finally we split up, I soloed the two bruisers on one side of the area while Cassandra was playing a different type of tennis with Gurd, much like your Inquisitor did.
 
It was a far slower kill than yours (25 minutes) but most of it is a rather slow and uninteresting game of cat and mouse with the first two bruisers which I could speed up if only I bothered learning to play with the tactical view. I'll have a video up soon (as soon as I get all the encoding out of the way). Thanks a TON ottffsse for both inspiring me to do this and for all the tips you provided. I feel like I'm part of a very small club now

good that you made it work for you! basically playing with 2 characters you see you have to think even more about tactics and individual strengthes and weaknesses of each class. it is also nice because you get even more a feeling like you are a 2 person "team" taking on the world in the single player campaign. I think I got the inspiration to go with two characters in this because I was doing a lot of puging in multiplayer where many time one is also playing in realtime and often is going through an area with just one other player because of the frequent disconnects and host migrations.

[Cydh]

I'm pretty sure any assassin can solo Gurd with a crazy combo (by that I mean I trust the player base to find a way to abuse damage multipliers to hell and back and make it work), but I'm not sure the content before Gurd is soloable by rogues without tonics & flasks. Someone prove me wrong, please, I'd be happy to applause.

 

Of course, one could lower the difficulty for the rest of the temple, but where would be the fun?

 

Gurd Harofsen (edited)

 

Cleaning the trash in the temple (edited)

[ottffsse]

as a completist here is my final fight against hakkon. dragons are much easier than Gurd so I went alone without Sera (no thousand cuts shenanigans). His little pets have to be killed quickly though. actually a pretty boring mage fight against dragon. there was one time that for some reason my ice mine expired unexpectedly and then he landed on me and I had to use a health pot. otherwise I was not too worried, as I had everything under control, but then again it's the dlc where you make one mistake and one of those little pets of his will be breathings 2000 points of ice damage per second on you. Plus they are immune to a bunch of effects I usually use to disable enemies. Thank god for static cage though.

[Tharkun]

Once I finish my current playthrough on nightmare I want to try this with my Qunari Knight-Enchanter.  I have some ideas but I need to put the time in.  Congratulations to you all on your achievements.  It is to be admired.

[Cydh]

 

as a completist here is my final fight against hakkon. dragons are much easier than Gurd so I went alone without Sera (no thousand cuts shenanigans). His little pets have to be killed quickly though. actually a pretty boring mage fight against dragon. there was one time that for some reason my ice mine expired unexpectedly and then he landed on me and I had to use a health pot. otherwise I was not too worried, as I had everything under control, but then again it's the dlc where you make one mistake and one of those little pets of his will be breathings 2000 points of ice damage per second on you. Plus they are immune to a bunch of effects I usually use to disable enemies. Thank god for static cage though.
 

 

Congratulations! I tried a few times on my warrior but each attempt takes soooo loooong it's truly hard to maintain my awareness long enough... on my best attempt his "pull" move oneshot me from full guard before I realized he was doing it

 

I've worked some more on two-manning Gurd Harofsen, trying to make it in a bearable time, and nature finds a way! Warrior/Cassandra, same team, better builds, better strategy and a huge improvement, from 25 minutes down to 8 minutes and 30 seconds, and I'm pretty sure I can still cut it in half (if not more).

 

11 minutes were shaved from the previous kill by killing the bruisers and spellbinders at the same time, then about seven minutes were shaved by using confusion grenades on Gurd's minions.

 

 

I almost feel dirty for coming up with this strategy.

[Arvaarad]

I'm not sure the content before Gurd is soloable by rogues without tonics & flasks.

An archer might have a rough time, but I noticed that the ice things don't break stealth, even if the character gets frozen. So a DW rogue could, in theory, Flank Attack their way to victory, only burning their potions on the one or two fights that are mandatory to unlock doors.

Permastealth really makes a huge difference in the number of enemies you fight. I'm going through that mission with a party right now, but I'm kind of wishing I had just brought my rogue, so I could say I soloed it. I've been largely ignoring the rest of my party, just letting them die while the inquisitor sneaks ahead.

[Cydh]

An archer might have a rough time, but I noticed that the ice things don't break stealth, even if the character gets frozen. So a DW rogue could, in theory, Flank Attack their way to victory, only burning their potions on the one or two fights that are mandatory to unlock doors.

Permastealth really makes a huge difference in the number of enemies you fight. I'm going through that mission with a party right now, but I'm kind of wishing I had just brought my rogue, so I could say I soloed it. I've been largely ignoring the rest of my party, just letting them die while the inquisitor sneaks ahead.

 

You can try to unequip all the gear and remove all active skills on your party members' skill bars 

 

I think that would be "close enough" and would let you sleep at night, knowing 99.99% it can be done

 

edit: just realized you were talking about skipping content - yeah that might be problematic if they keep aggroing stuff. I tried to skip everything before the door to the temple, and they won't open if you're in combat. The spies don't "leash" either, they keep following you throughout the entire level until they die, keeping you in combat forever.

[Arvaarad]

You can try to unequip all the gear and remove all active skills on your party members' skill bars

I think that would be "close enough" and would let you sleep at night, knowing 99.99% it can be done

edit: just realized you were talking about skipping content - yeah that might be problematic if they keep aggroing stuff. I tried to skip everything before the door to the temple, and they won't open if you're in combat. The spies don't "leash" either, they keep following you throughout the entire level until they die, keeping you in combat forever.

Hm, now that I think of it, it might be easier than I thought to do a DW solo.

Multiple ranged is always a dicey situation for daggers, since it's harder to evade multiple projectiles. And there's definitely a required fight that features several ranged enemies. But then I remembered - I can just spend the entire cooldown of the bubble ability in stealth.

I might genuinely reload so I can try this.

[ottffsse]

An archer might have a rough time, but I noticed that the ice things don't break stealth, even if the character gets frozen. So a DW rogue could, in theory, Flank Attack their way to victory, only burning their potions on the one or two fights that are mandatory to unlock doors.

Permastealth really makes a huge difference in the number of enemies you fight. I'm going through that mission with a party right now, but I'm kind of wishing I had just brought my rogue, so I could say I soloed it. I've been largely ignoring the rest of my party, just letting them die while the inquisitor sneaks ahead.

I just did a run of the temple before the fight just with Sera. Turned my quisi comletely off. It is doable as I can always go into stealth after I do big burst damage and then repeat (cycling between stealth and flask of lightning). The only trouble I had was against like a group of 3-4 archers and 3-4 mages as they can quickly hit me from range. Otherwise I go snipe snipe. I also enchanted Sera's new bow with 10% proc on hit do Veilstrike which does wonders to the archers and mages. Leaping shot/ Long shot spam  (after flask of fire) usually results in things being laid flat on the floor due to veilstrike. did not have enough time to do gurd himself though yet but I am sure its doable as I have tools (stealth / flask of lightning, leaping shot) to avoid his grip attack. 

[Cydh]

So, I soloed the temple on my warrior on Nightmare (Except Gurd, grrr).

 

The hard part is indeed outside of the temple. I managed to split the Spies in two groups, kill one and skip the other two. I have no idea how it happened, I'll check the video.

 

Spoiler

 

For some reason the other two retreated to this spot and allowed me to drop combat (and save!) after I killed the first spy:

 

Spoiler

 

This pack is the one I need to work on (3 archers 1 bruiser). I wanted to see how it was inside the temple, so I ended up using a grenade, but I really shouldn't have. I need to find a way to abuse line of sight until they're all in range for the mark.

 

Spoiler

 

Inside, for a warrior, it's a matter of patience against bruisers, brutality against archers, and finesse against everything else. Fortunately we do have our little sword & shield secret to kill things quickly.

 

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

I need Gurd now, only managed to reach the undead archer phase , but I kinda sorta think I need to restart and bring a +4 grenade belt.

 

Spoiler

 

and then Origins crashed in the middle of a decent attempt, I just hope I still have my saves.

 

Spoiler

 

Guys, you have no excuse now