War Cry won't attract the attention of the archers. They seem to attack a random party member. The 2X rogue with dual gloves and paralytic knives is really great for damage mitigation in the higher waves, but even in the 90's in Doomvale Arena, the archers have a ton of health and only take a few shots to take out a non-tank. At that point the bard is woefully underprepared to keep the group up. I may try the cleric sometime but at this point I'm not going for high score just yet.
If you're just starting out, you can definitely make room for another damage dealer and remove one of the knights. There are certain instances and gameplay styles that may be well suited to two knights, but I don't think it's a necessity in the normal campaign.
I started out 2 tanking but found dps issues to be a problem, esp with the healing skeli mages. I switched one out with a berserker and things have gone much smoothly. I just make sure my tank gets all the best gear to take on those 3 ogre pulls, and the berserker can take the majority of trash with little issue. If I want to make him even more self sufficient I can slap 2 high ranking life leech trinkets on him.
I haven't tried the Barbarians for Doomvale. What talents and trinkets do you recommend? I'm still using Knight/Rogue/Rogue/Bard. On the beginning of each wave I'll begin rounding things up with the knight until an ogre or a slime appears, and then I'll war cry and start running laps with the knight while my rogues focus on one target at a time until I'm down to just one ogre, which I'll then tank. I never try to tank more than one ogre or even a single slime. It's funny you mentioned the two cleric waves. I've only run into that a couple of times but at one point I was at a high enough wave that I had to completely dump all of my rogues' cooldowns to kill one of the clerics because the healing was just that strong.
you can't kite the archers as they don't move, and war cry doesn't affect who they choose as targets unfortunately. the best way to deal with those rounds are to just take them down one by one as fast as possible with your dps, CCing as much and as often as you can. horror, paralytic knife, thunderbolt and the barbarian's leap for the knockdown all work well to put a hold on their attacks while you knock them off.
Also the cleric's vengence ability works nice, especially when you move her into range or back them into a corner. She is immune and kicking butt. If you have the bard, you can have her do it twice in a row.
Did you have success doing this in the 130+ rounds? At these rounds the archers have so much health that even a full Song of War + Enrage + Flurry barbarian cannot kill one or two archers before all my CC's go on cooldown.... I tried using Rogue but even with paralytic knife I lacked the DPS to kill the archers quickly enough before my CC ran out (more CC generally results in less DPS). The only way I improve my high score now is just hoping I never get the 6 archer round Using Cleric for immune Vengeful Spirit or w/e as wolpak suggested could be an interesting idea, but I'd have to replace my Bard then, dropping my overall DPS. I can't have both Bard and Cleric because I would then be woefully lacking either CC (if I take away Wiz/Witch) or DPS (if I take away Barbarian).
Given everybody's complaining about the 6-archer lottery in arena, I'm pretty confident Mika will address it. Random targeting + spikey damage isn't a fun combination. If it were me, I'd reduce the HP scaling of the archers so that you can, if you're very quick, take down a full compliment of them on a single (robust) set of CC abilities.
agreed that the 6 archer setup is near impossible anywhere past 115 in doomvale. ive done it a few times but only when very lucky aka having wynter's cooldowns (horror mostly) be reset by the double eyeballs and just draining them down one at a time. i do recommend speccing all of your favorite classes to have cc abilities in almost every section of the tree, because at the higher levels the damage output matters less than the ability to keep your team safe considering the waves dont begin until the last one ended. let me know how it goes
So true. I also have Wynter with two eyeballs, it works like a charm. Also, try to utilize the slow motion to examine the best next action. If you have a knight, put him in a camp of archers and hit Intimidate. If you have a monk, Ki-Blast them. If you have both or even all three, you win.
Does anyone have tips on the Golem that don't involve simply being level 30+ with all the best gear? ie - something to do with tactics? My party is level 21 at the moment and he's kicking our tails. I can get him down to about 1/4 strength but haven't managed to beat him yet.
I think he's one of the most straightforward bosses in the game. He doesn't spawn any additional monsters or anything; it's basically just tank and spank. - Make sure he's always targeting a solid melee character (knight or monk). Occasionally in the fight the golem will make a strong attack which will knock your character back, and switch to another target. Just tell your melee to attack him again and make whoever is his new target run away until the melee guy has grabbed him again. Keep melee guy healed, of course. - Sometimes he jumps up and causes fireballs to fall (AoE damage, basically). Not luch to do other than endure and heal. If that kills you, you need to work on your levels, armor or healing. - Sometimes he starts attacking WAY hard. There's an animation you need to spot and I believe he should turn red during that phase (though I've seen him enter that phase without changing color - either a bug or I missed something). This is the one time you need to make your melee guy run away; golem will follow. Luckily, as long as this is up, the golem moves very slowly. Just heal up and pew pew him from a distance with your Wiz/Witch. And that's it, basically. Aggro reset, AoE damage, berserk mode, it's all he has. If you manage all this properly but still lose, then it's just that your damage-taking/ healing capacity is too low compared to his own DPS. All you can do then is get better equipment and/or more levels. You may try to just kite him around if your melee guy really can't take the damage, but it's going to take longer to bring him down.
That did it, thanks. I previously wasn't running away during his red phase and that's when he was usually killing us. I actually lost my Knight early in the battle and managed to take him down using just the Monk, Cleric, Mage but it also required having the Monk run away from time to time to rest up a bit.
You don't need to run away when the golem buffs. Just debuff him. A witch debuff, or a cleric buff to your tank is more than enough.
The buff to the knight's shield is ridiculous. I put his shield up and have the cleric shield him and red slimes commit suicide on him.
I've gotten to lvl123 doom arena and like other said wynder is pretty much essential in group. Her fear is great while u curse another and have fear shield for rng fears not to mention selfhealing on shadow bolts and imp drain life plus 2xeye for procs. I used knight, cleric and wiz (pre 1.04). --wynder-- (2x eye) Curse/ leech / horror / terrify/ harvest --wizard-- (2x eye) Blizz/ splash/ conflag/ mage armor/ shockwave --knight-- (2x red feast) Fear/ cry/ cripple /fortress(prepatch) --cleric-- (2x eye) Shield/ disipline/ angel/ hot/ prayer I usually send knight towards biggest clump of archers to warcry which still taunts archers for one shot before they change target. Wiz meteor group while conflag one of the far away ones and use wynder curse another stray. Use knight fear once they get up and use wiz blizz (does dmg plus they don't run away from knight much, easier to target anyway). Wynder horror after that. Then need to use cleric guardian angel - I found double healing output helps more than wasting some time not healing moving cleric to knockback couple archers. After that is just case of focus fire and some luck with procs Hope that may help Edit- need to try out new revenge on slimes likely change build to revenge since initial taunt with shield will help with dmg tho not sure if I'm understanding the description correctly? Does the ability not reflect 100% of all attacks? Was trying it out earlier on last boss and still received dmg from the adds. Id understand if doesn't work for boss aoe ability. Edit2- not sure if anyone know or tried before but monks evasion avoids last boss aoe blast attack (only knocks back without dmg), knights revenge doesn't work sadly
Lvl144 now but tried with different setup this time. Knight/rogue/witch/cleric. Knight with lodestones and rogue with gloves. Revenge does substantial dmg back to the archers tho still receive some dmg so need shield or angel just incase. Pretty hectic without aoe and knockdown. Ended up losing both rogue and witch on 2nd archer round then cleared 10 mobs with revenge ftw! ended with 2 orge and mage 2 shot my knight through angel.
