battle at undercoft (spolier to come)

[richard]

I am having a hard time with the two Seer Lords battle in Undercoft.

Every time when one Seer Lords comes, he three shots or if both are there, four shots a character.
There just to many monster conversing on  the characters.

I tried going to the north west, and both Seer Lord come and shot me to pieces.
Try the south, and one Seer Lord just hit for over 700 a shot.  Three shot and dead.
 
I do not see a place where  I can limit the monster access.

So I would like some suggestion.

[fallen]

richard - to confirm, this is your second visit to the City of the Dead.

First up, you might want to take a Restore Point and go back to a town to regroup. What I am going to suggest is best when done early and not in an already desperate situation. This is the moment to use your Buffing items to the max. You can use them in advance of combat. Use Spines, Head-Takers Boon, Mountain Tomes, Giant Tomes, Tomes of Wrath etc ... PILE on the buffs. Then use Tome of Sustainment to keep the buffs up for the combat.

[drdave]

richard In addition to fallen's advice, remember to use +MP buffs/equipment. Then, as soon as the seer lords are in range, hit them with -AP curses, try to get them down to 1AP and keep them there. I then concentrated on destroying the foci, using all those extra MP to get between them quickly. Also, IIRC, destroying a focus restores all your characters' AP, so use as many AP from the others in your party before destroying each one.

[fallen]

@drdave - great tips. Those are so key. Fighting the SL without taking the focuses out is a loss. So you really have to get around or through their forces to reach those foci.

[richard]

It is the second visit to the City of the Dead.
And I am back at a restore point (for the sixth time)
I will plan on getting all of the buff possible going along with Tome of Sustainment.

Question - which town has the tomes?

[richard]

It is suggested that the dialog before the undercoft battle be more dire.
Maybe suggesting that select tome be applied.

[fallen]

richard - most towns have tomes but you might need to go the Storm Bastion or something. I haven't checked the game files, takes a while to figure that out. Did you find them?

[contributor]

richard, I'll be coming around to that fight for the second time soon. The first time I think I did it with a death or two on Nightmare. I'm not sure exactly how to help as I don't know the dynamics of your group. I don't think I used too many tomes beyond the sustainment ones. When I get there again I'll look more carefully at the map to see what more specific advice I can give, but I remember that I pulled immediately towards one of the Lords/foci. That gave me more time one-on-one and I think I only had a few turns with them together. They can be terrible to fight at the same time. Obviously what DrDave said about stripping their AP is probably the biggest thing. Once they're down to 1AP each you should be able to have a character that can tank them both even if they're very near dead each turn. If you have two lower HP Dexi-Tanks you might have a separate tank for each one. If that's still not enough then your only option is really to keep moving. You might spend whole turns without doing any damage, but you'll keep your peeps alive. If you have to do this, the more trash mobs you leave on the board the better, actually. This helps because they may block a path, trapping a Seer Lord and giving you some time to hammer on a foci or go one-on-one with the other one. It will be tedious, but it's about the only thing you can do.

[fallen]

Definitely recommend moving immediately toward one of the foci. Any kind of other delay just lets the second Seer Lord keep up and puts you into an on-going fight against summoners. Its a waste of time and an increase of risk.

[contributor]

Ok, so here's the retelling of my round 2 at the Undercroft. Difficulty is Nightmare. Team is level 54 except Vincent who is 55. My team is Kincaid, Tamilin, Vincent and Fyona. We running Strickening and Vincent is hitting with Energy Storm and also boosting the group with Thundering Blades to get low resistance and big weakness against Lightning damage. Kincaid is the primary Dexi-tank and boosts the group with Flanking Unity 10. Tamilin hits with Torrent of Steel, further reducing Resistance and AP. Everybody has at least a -1AP AOE attack so we've got lots of options for AP stripping. Fyona is secondary tank. She's really good against melee but gets hit by ranged easily, but she has more HP to protect her.

The team has Giant's Tome (+200HP/SP), Tome of Wrath (+4 Acc, +24 Damage) Head-Taker's Boon (+50% crit damage), Words of Holy Bond (+2 Acc +16 Holy) and Tome of Blazing Speed (+2 Move Points). Here we go.

Turn 1: Pulled everyone straight right. We're in a pretty tight group between the two bridges with Fyona out front. Top left Seer remains in place while the top right Seer comes straight south. He should be in the fog not too far from the team. Fyona takes some damage (about 600) and we're facing a Wraith and the rightward bridge is now blocked by archers. The Seer Lord is close but in the fog.

Turn 2: We're going to try to press through everyone towards the Seer and past him to the focus. Hopefully we'll cripple him and leave Kincaid or Fyona to tank him. Cleared a path on the bridge. We make it to Emesai and strip him down to 1 AP. Kincaid is going to tank him, but the group is stuck on the next "rock island" unable to get on the bridge towards the focus. Fyona is rear-guarding, with Tam and Vincent sandwiched between her and Kincaid. Wraith, Seer and Necromantic Lord are all down to 1 AP. Not too worried about the trash at this point. Fyona and Vincent take damage. Kincaid is hit for all of 22 damage by Emesai (hah!). Top left Seer is still holding position. I think being far away from him discourages him to move.

Turn 3: The bridge north to the focus is obstructed, but not blocked. We're going to try and move everyone up there. Probably won't do much damage. Killed a few mobs on the bridge, stripped a few Wraiths. Everyone is up by the focus. Fyona only moved and drank some HP pots for everyone. She is pretty exposed to some Wraiths and we're going to find out Emesai's range, but the next turn we should take down the focus. Kincaid gets blasted by Emesai for 1080, leaving him with 450hp. Fyona gets hammered on by Wraiths for around 1000 hp, but she's still has about half of her HP. Emesai has moved up, which means we can't get out of his range next turn. Rasp (I believe) still hasn't moved yet. He's making this easy.

Turn 4: Going for the focus and then going to turn on the damage and kill Emesai. Focus, is down. I forgot about it restoring AP. I could have done that better, because Kincaid and Vincent still had full AP. Man Emesai is hard to hit. 7340HP to go. Kincaid gets hit by Emesai for 700. Others take some ranged damage. Rasp holds position again.

Turn 5: We're healing and cursing. We stack Silent Stalker and Reckoning onto all the other curses already on Emesai and he loses about 1000 HP. Some trash gets killed in the Storm and I try to strip all the AP from the Wraiths that I can. I've got a Necro-Lord behind Emesai out of range that is hammering the team. Kincaid gets hit for 1000 and then by an archer, bring him down to 150 hp, brutal! Wraiths also hit him twice but can't get through his sure parry. That was close!

Turn 6: I'm tempted to move the party north and away from Emesai to pull the Necro Lord up, but that would mean Emesai could hit anyone and he might insta-kill Vincent. Maybe stay put. We take Emesai down to 4700 and clear out some trash. I can't seem to hit Emesai with melee. Party move north slightly to get out of range, but everything is focused on Kincaid now as the sole tank. That was probably poor thinking, after the last turn. Hopefully Emesai will move north allowing me to reposition. Nope, he's not moving, but he used his magical attack for only 44 damage! Rasp stays put, but a group of archers is massing to the south, where I can't get to until Emesai is dead.

Turn 7: Hopefully we're going to output a lot of damage here and kill a Wraith or two. One Wraith is down and a Spectre Lord. Emesai is down to 2500. Next turn??? Fyona moves down to help Kincaid tank. Fyona get's hit for 1000 and some other hits. A Bone Golem arrives. The odd thing is the group of mobs splits up and Emesai goes about 5 squares NW onto the focus mound.

Turn 8: We're going to reposition and get out of range of the archers to our south. We probably won't have enough AP to kill Emesai though. Woot! Tamilin comes through with some massive crits on Emesai and he bites it. 500 hp at 1 AP is pretty sick! Time to mop up this side of the map.

Turn 9-?: We kill everything in the top-right and head south then west and clean up a lot of trash and one Wraith. Rasp stays put, pretty much until we're back to the original stairs. In two turns we intercept him on a bridge and strip his AP. Fyona will tank him for a turn and We'll run past him to get to his Focus. There are not many trash mobs left and no archers that I can see, which are about the only big concern, beyond Rasp. Rasp hits Fyona for 1k.

Turn ?1: We pass Rasp and get out of his range. Next turn we can take out the Focus. At the moment it just has a few useless Spectres hanging around with a Spectre Lord. Rasp moves up but we should be able to get out of his range one more time and still hit the focus pretty hard.

Turn ?2: Focus is destroyed. We should be out of Rasp's reach. We'll let him come to us. We clean up a few Spectres. Rasp moves up.

Turn ?3: We kill everything in the NW except Rasp and a Wraith. Rasp is already down to 5200 HP and pretty well cursed. Fyona is going to tank him for a round. Fyona is hit for 700.

Turn ?4: Wow, everyone crits Rasp! Kincaid alone hits for 893 once, even with 1 ap he hits for 400. We're doing fine on XP so I'm going to pass up on the two remaining Wraiths and kill Rasp now. Vincent drops a final 700 crit to take him out. It is finished.

[contributor]

Looking back on it, having a lot of MP and not being afraid to spend all of it and my AP to get in a good position seems pretty key. I remember in the first time through I actually moved around more than I did above, because if both Seer Lords show up you have to be in a good defensive position and you're better off burning a turn to get into position (which may mean out of range) than trying to do a lot of damage. If lots of things are hitting you, mass AP strippage is big too.

Movement-wise heading directly east or west seems to be the best idea as this may cause one Seer-Lord to hold position. So don't try to go North or South first, but use all AP/MP to get to one side or the other.

I'm not sure why, but Rasp (on the left) died a lot faster than Emesai. So potentially taking him on first would be a smarter move because in the beginning there are a lot of other mobs that could cause problems. I also didn't have any Necro-Lords on his side of the map, but that might have been random.

[richard]

After destroying the focuses, was able to have the local Neco created lots of bowman and block at path to me.
Then focused on Emesia until dead.
Next for Rasp (which was easier to kill)
I was surprise that all of the other monster disappear after Rasp was died.

It was a long battle.

[contributor]

Glad you finally got it.

I might be reading you wrong, but just so you know (for the next time right!) you don't have to destroy both foci first. You can destroy one and then perma-kill it's Seer and then go get the other one.

[fallen]

Apr 12, 2018 3:58:03 GMT -5 contributor said:

Glad you finally got it.

I might be reading you wrong, but just so you know (for the next time right!) you don't have to destroy both foci first. You can destroy one and then perma-kill it's Seer and then go get the other one.

That is correct. Probably the fastest way is to hit one foci, take out its seer lord and then wipe the other one.