So I just gave up on fighting the undead nemesis after several deaths over 15 minutes of protracted fighting. Between having more hit points than God, summonable crystals that can consistently stunlock you with their freeze attacks, and attacks that can do 9k damage through capped cold resistance and maxed Maiven’s Sphere of Protection, I think he could stand to be brought down a bit. I mean even if you like a challenge, he’s just agonizing to fight against because it takes so long. At the very least his crystals shouldn’t be able to freeze you so often (most of my deaths were from being stunlocked, even a Hoarfrost potion couldn’t prevent it).
Dodging his ice meteors is essential unless you are super tanky. I guess it has physical damage component so it hurts a lot, easily one shot you if 3+ meteors hit you. You can time his meteors cast tho.
Hoarfrost portion to get 100% freeze reduction is a must, especially for melee.
If you are still stunlocked by freeze, lead him to move a bit to a spot that (most of) his ice crystals cannot hit you.
His melee damage is indeed insane, I had my 10k melee char go down to 5% hp in a hit on ultimate, pre-hotfix. It’s really puzzling since most of his attacks actually do not hit that hard, maybe 4-5k, and his attack speed is slow enough to recover.
Moosilauke is actually just another melee-unfriendly boss in a non-melee friendly meta. Shares this trait with Sharzul and Log :undecided:
In all fairness, Log was once very melee-friendly.
And yeah, Hoarfrost helps a lot against this guy and any other enemy unique that likes to use freezing attacks.
I had an impression that skeletal golems and Moo overhead smash hits with both hands, so it is technically two hits. I also seen 10K hp character going to 0 hp from that smash in B29 or 30, yet highest damage taken in statistics was ~6,5K.
Best things to counter it are BWC and warcry, even better if you have armor, damage absorption, phys resist etc layered defenses in addition.
Just fought him and I don’t really see what the big deal is. His first phase took about 2 minutes and that was mainly because a pack of heroes spawned right next to him. It likely would have otherwise been under a minute. His second phase took a little over 2 minutes and I made numerous user-errors throughout the fight. He also never even got close to killing me and I let him hit me at least once with every attack he had. The ones that actually did noticeable damage were very telegraphed, so I see no reason that you wouldn’t be able to avoid them.
The crystals were also easy to deal with as they are quite frail. You can also hard counter them by just walking away. If you’re using hoarfrost potion and dying from being chain-frozen, I can’t help but think you were just deliberately ignoring the crystals in the first place.
I definitely wouldn’t consider this fight “agonizing”. It didn’t feel anymore difficult than the other nemeses in my opinion.
His first phase is really easy, just move out when he telegraphs his overhead smash and move away if he casts his comet storm.
Second phase is a bit more tricky, but really just the above plus a hoarfrost to remove the chain freeze. Try and fight him in an open area if possible, it will make your job a whole lot easier.
Let me guess, you were playing your phantasmal blades spellbreaker? No offense, but that’s the most powerful build in the game, and you’re one of the best Grim Dawn players in the world, with better items than most players could ever dream of finding. I wouldn’t take your experience to be the norm.
As for avoiding the attacks, yes, you can do that to an extent. If you’re melee, though, there’s nothing you can do about the crystals because if you get close enough to attack them you get shotgunned by their attacks and stunlocked. Running away isn’t a hard counter, or a counter at all, because all it does is stop the fight, and you can’t do any damage when you’re not fighting. Besides which, they blanket the screen with their projectiles and it’s not exactly easy to dodge them at the best of times. Remember, it only takes one hit for the chain reaction to start and the fight to be effectively over for you.
Since I brought builds into it, I should probably point out that I’m playing a primal strike druid with a best-in-slot weapon and an assortment of legendaries and greens.
EDIT: I don’t even want to imagine what a cold build has to do to win…
If you’re using hoarfrost you shouldn’t be chain frozen. You can also maneuver yourself so that the crystals don’t hit you, though that’s tricky.
I’m pretty sure the crystal summons have a CD, so if you lure him away you can go wail on him for 15sec or so before he resummons them.
Why would I be offended? That sounded more like a compliment 
(I fought him with a few builds, btw).
As for avoiding the attacks, yes, you can do that to an extent. If you’re melee, though, there’s nothing you can do about the crystals because if you get close enough to attack them you get shotgunned by their attacks and stunlocked. Running away isn’t a hard counter, or a counter at all, because all it does is stop the fight, and you can’t do any damage when you’re not fighting. Besides which, they blanket the screen with their projectiles and it’s not exactly easy to dodge them at the best of times. Remember, it only takes one hit for the chain reaction to start and the fight to be effectively over for you.
I did fight him with a couple melee builds (one of which was a cold melee witch hunter) and it felt pretty easy to me. I usually just immediately killed the crystals when he spawned them.
Since I brought builds into it, I should probably point out that I’m playing a primal strike druid with a best-in-slot weapon and an assortment of legendaries and greens.
That explains a lot. Primal strike in my opinion is a fairly underpowered skill for single-target damage. I think the issue is more likely the skill itself rather than Moosilauke.
EDIT: I don’t even want to imagine what a cold build has to do to win…
They just need to lower his resistances. Much like a lightning build fighting Valdaran.
These two parts of the comment seem to sum things up nicely. Try out Moosilauke with something other than Primal Strike; the skill peters off in effectiveness very rapidly.
Furthermore, as soon as you see the Crystals, you either need to destroy them immediately if you possess the dps to do so, or kite out of range of them if you do not. Fighting Moose within range of the Crystals is a deathwish.
Yeah, Primal Strike is probably less than ideal for nemesis hunting, but you’re never gonna convince me that stunlocking is good game design, especially when it’s so hard to avoid it. I stand by my claim that the crystals need to be toned down a bit.
Oh, I don’t disagree with that. I tried letting him freely summon his crystals and he was able to flood the area with them, making it nearly impossible to move. It wasn’t particularly dangerous, but it is pretty obnoxious. They could stand to have a slightly longer cooldown or a summon limit of 3 since he seems to have a habit of spamming them if you aren’t able to take them out fairly quickly.
That’s probably all it would take, yeah. I’ve run into him a few more times, and while I still can’t kill him on Ultimate, I don’t think he’s quite so bad as I thought aside from the constant freezing (that 9k hit I took was fairly telegraphic now that I know what to look for).
I have 84% cold res and 59% freeze res and I find him very easy on ultimate. I have pretty good gear since I farmed a lot for it (and got very lucky) but he didn’t take me down by even 10% hp. Use cold res and freeze res options when fighting him if you don’t already have them up and he should be much easier.
I didn’t even know how to fight him as he was my first nemesis I seen. I stayed at range first incase he hit me hard but after I seen I could handle his damage very well I just facetanked him.
the worst nemesis are the deaths vigil one and the aetheral one.
I thought those were the easiest ones (the aetherial one being a glorified reanimator and the order one being trivialized by high vitality resists)?
Aetherial one isn’t just a mass horde spawner, he does crazy amounts of lightning damage. I think I got oneshotted once by that, but I don’t remember how much resist I had back then.
It’s not just that but he also teleports himself and yourself around pretty obnoxiously. I never said I wanted to be teleported! No means NO
I find the chthonian to be the worst personally. Those stupid rift prison things are AIDS
chain frozen = gg ugh i hate this nemesis with an absolute passion