I haven’t had much time to play (Almost weekend…) but I did fire up the ascended mode last night, checked a few of my characters to see how hard the health nerfs hit them, and wandered around a bit. Most monsters took a little more effort but still died pretty quickly.
Then my archon wandered around the Necropolis a bit and pretty soon I got this message about something being wrong…
Queue a good five minutes of running around watching that thing swallow up half the map with earthquakes and these black hole thingies that could take my character down from 24K health to 2K in about half a second.
I won in the end without too much trouble… but probably only because this happened to be my Vitality Vire’s Might/Primal Strike scated (with new Rotgheist buffs, very nice) who can also beat the Ravager of Souls with hit and run.
My first experience with the Dread was with Korba Trickster. After kiting it for 5 mins, barely doing 20% damage with ros and blizzards, it finally caught up and oneshot me. Never visited the map again on the same run. This Dread literally turned Ascended into Little Nightmares.
I’ve met him first time in Arkovia, on Dagallon Purifier, after vaguely remembering “oh, that’s a thing” and making a sacrifice at the altar to spawn him. Guy killed me about 3 times, and once got healed from 30% to full by random skeletal priest. Overall pretty neat fight, been avoiding it since then.
My condolences to hardcore players stumbling into him though.
I started FoA with a pet build and I killed it 3 times on ascended, it’s actually very easy with a decent pet build, perhaps too easy. But since the loot is rather underwhelming and the thing pops up so often I’ve now resorted to just running away. Takes way too long, reward too small.
It’s an easy kite with a Clairvoyant’s Set Spellbinder so long as the terrain cooperates. I’ve fought it three times: died the first time since I was already dealing with Moos in Steps of Torment and I got bottle-necked, killed it readily the other two times when I had room to work (looping the thing does the trick).
Really nicely designed monster, good telegraphs. I like it so much, I might steal it for my pen-and-paper games! For melee, there’s a couple of decent windows to stick damage on it. Shadow Strike builds shouldn’t have any problems at all barring map geometry problems or adds. I do wonder about melee auto-attack replacer/WPS builds; gives me a little anxiety to think about it! Ranged characters though? No worries, just be patient, avoid the seeking orb and the slime and lay into it when it stops to do its big claw sweeps.
I’ve got a Ghol’s Ritualist that can handle everything…except this douche-bag. Once I get him down to 40%, he heals back to 65%. Then, he decides to ignore all of my attacks pointless for 2-3 minutes.
I can stand in front of him basically the entire time. But I’m not going to bother anymore, especially when he can spawn in closets (like Sylvarria’s Den) where my Pets are useless.
I beat it with my blademaster. After two deaths I learn the pattern: don’t stand in black puddles even for one sec and always kite his sander attack. He is pretty slow, so no big deal.
Since then it’s trivial. At least for my build. More helms for the helms throne.
