Minor anti-dorudugan tech

[thelee]

In case you wanted a minimally cheesy way to get rid of dorudugan (without the balance patch), I recommend chaining together a bunch of petrifies of sufficient level. I stumbled on this unintentionally with my disruptor theurge because it was the first time I was combining helm of the the white wind with a chanter and a druid, and I did it again without that specific build, though I definitely did the math beforehand to make sure it would work again. I still think the theurge is the most self-contained way to do it, but you can do this with a combination of:

• a wizard that can cast arkemyr's wondrous torment with high base intellect and weyc's wand
• a druid that can cast Embrace of the Earth Talon OR a wizard that can cast petrification, with high base intellect
• a priest that can cast Salvation of Time (* combined with the below, only main bit of cheese here)
• weyc's robe
• club modal
• morningstar modal
• a bunch of other accuracy bonuses for your petrifier (esp against vessels), or penalties to fortitude, some combination of
  • your petrifier being the mainchar and becoming rymrgand's champion and destroying all the souls in SSS (up to +6)
  • helm of the white wind (easy +10)
  • multiclassing with a ranger for hunter's claw, marked prey, and stalker's link (ez, but pretty strict on what your character needs to be)
  • multiclassing with a monk for dance with death, which gets you up to +15
  • necklace of the bones (+5)
  • devotions for the faithful (+10, plus a -8 to enemy fort if you land the debuff)
  • PL bonuses (e.g. prestige, potion of ascendance, lance of the midwood stag + woodskin/form of hte delemgan, weyc's wand)
  • boras (+5 to spells)
  • obsidian black wurm pet (+3 when flanked)
    • remember that there's an optoinal berath's blessing that lets eder equip a pet for doubling up on both boras and the obsidian black wurm
  • ngati's tusk (hunter of hunters can give you up to ~10 debuff against fortitude)
  • gloves of accuracy
  • edit: long nights chant can apply weakened (resisted down to sickened) for -10 debuff plus an additional -4 from the stat penalty
  • edit: this isn’t a comprehensive list, just what comes to mind easily

depending on what you have, your build can be more or less strict - on PotD dorudugan has 180 fortitude. you can pretty easily bring that down to 155 with just a morningstar modal and ngati's tusk (-35). a level 20 character with 10 perception will start off with 77 accuracy, so you need to find a way to close the gap of 103 accuracy, so you can have a net advantage against dorodugan's fortitude of +24, which means you'll never miss. Might sound like a tall order, but based on the list above there's quite a bit of flexibility to how to hit that goal (e.g. one successful casting of devotions will swing the accuracy-defense number by 18, (you get +10 acc, dorudugan gets -8 fort); the spell you use will itself have some innate accuracy bonus; etc). here's an example from my most recent attempt:

(sorry it's in german) in this particular situation, i ended up with a net +31. I overshot the +24 requirement because I honestly kept making mistakes in this run (e.g. i forgot to become rymrgand's champion) so I ended up pulling together some extra bouses in case my math was wrong or made some other mistakes. translating into english and explaining the math, my accuracy buffs were:

• +24 from 34 perception (maxed orlan and white wends to start for 21, +1 from the alchemist's hut, +1 from a cloak, +1 from a ring, +2 from sleeping with aenalys, +3 from svef, +5 from intuitive from least unstable coil [important that it's from an item, so it stacks with svef])
• +8 from embrace the earth talon's ability level (petrification would have +16 *)
• +11 from power levels (+5 from SC level 20 druid and prestige [petrification would only get +1 from prestige *], +2 from lance of the midwood stag, +2 from potion of ascendancy, +1 from spellshaping the spell smaller, +1 from weyc's robe brilliant [important from an item, so it stacks with potion of ascendancy])
• +3 from gloves of accuracy
• +10 from helm of the white wind
• +5 from boras
• +3 from changeling's mantel armor random pet aura (this was actually pure luck and wasn't planned on, but you could theoretically save-scum this bonus if you're relying on it)
• +4 from sweet aroma aura from keeper of the flame
• +10 from devotions of the faithful
• +5 from necklace of bones
• dorudugan gets -25 from morningstar
• dorudugan gets -8.8 from ngati's tusk aura (i did this suboptimally, you should be able to get to 9 or 10)
• dorudugan gets -10 from ben fidel's neck invocation
• dorudugan also gets a "hidden" -8 because their might is reduced by 4 from devotions

 

TL;DR game plan I mentioned this in another thread, but a wizard with wecy's wand, empowering arkemyr's wondrous torment is guaranteed to at least graze, which will tank dorudugan's resolve down to 25, at which point even a normal casting of arkemyr's wondrous torment will easily last for 30 seconds. combine with club modal, dorudugan's will defense is pretty much shot, which makes refreshing arkemyr's wondrous torment easy, as well as making it easy to add on other will-targeting debuffs if you need to.

getting down to 25 resolve makes all the difference. it means your morningstar and club modals stop lasting for only a couple of seconds even on high intellect characters. it also means that embrace the earth talon and petrification, on a decently high intellect+power scaling character, will last 12+ seconds, which also means that even on a graze you'll still petrify dorudugan long enough to cast another after brilliant gives you another resource. with key players having brilliant from weyc's robe plus salvation of time, you can petrify-lock dorudugan all the way to his death and you can completely bypass all the annoying fireball/fire explosion dodging. just need to pay attention to refresh arkemyr's wondrous torment before it runs out (most important!) as well as any other debuffs you have going on.

 

Why "Embrace the Earth Talon" or "Petrification?" Both have higher base durations than Gaze of the Adragan, which matters quite a bit for competing against Dorudugan's resolve, even when its hit with wondrous torment. You could probably cobble enough bonus PL with like an illusionist and some items, but then you start making it hard to cobble together the bonus accuracy you need to actually land it past dorudugan's fortitude defenses.

I weakly prefer the druid for their embrace the earth talon here, because it actually does damage (helps speed things along) and more importantly you get two casts from the start which can help cushion the early rocky start as you get things going and your resource regen still needs to get everything back to 100%. plus, if you only have a single wizard who's responsible for wondrous torment AND petrification might easily be missing out on a cast of petrification because of resource regen being random.

* petrification being at higher level also has an advantage in that it has a higher innate accuracy then a comparable embrace the earth talon. you get +2 acc per ability level, and only +1 per power level, so all things being equal you'd rather a level 20 wizard casting petrification than a level 20 druid casting embrace in terms of affecting the net accuracy balance.

 

Why do this at all? There are plenty of other far easier, far cheesier ways to get dorudugan, but I like this because while it certainly is cheesy, it feels like you still have to work for it a bit (getting all the items and coordinating the chaining debuffs) and is satisfying as a result, versus just hammering Dorudugan down with axe modal and blade cascade, or attritioning it out with gouging strike's endless DoT. Plus, outside of dorudugan, you can do this against most bosses in the game (very few enemies in my memory are actually immune to dexterity afflictions, they tend to just be resistant) without needing as many accuracy bonuses, so it can serve as a decent strategy across your entire run if you feel like slightly cheesing out a harder boss encounter.

Edited November 21, 2021 by thelee

[NotDumbEnough]

I believe you can even use two copies of the same pet by copying them with the machine in the Dark Cupboard.

[Helz]

3 hours ago, thelee said:

TL;DR game plan I mentioned this in another thread, but a wizard with wecy's wand, empowering arkemyr's wondrous torment is guaranteed to at least graze, which will tank dorudugan's resolve down to 25, at which point even a normal casting of arkemyr's wondrous torment will easily last for 30 seconds. combine with club modal, dorudugan's will defense is pretty much shot, which makes refreshing arkemyr's wondrous torment easy, as well as making it easy to add on other will-targeting debuffs if you need to.

getting down to 25 resolve makes all the difference. it means your morningstar and club modals stop lasting for only a couple of seconds even on high intellect characters.

This is really useful. I went in knowing that he has a ridiculous amount of HP, but between his super-high evasion and the fact that debuffs only last about 4 seconds on him, I just said screw it.

[Not So Clever Hound]

8 hours ago, thelee said:

Why do this at all? There are plenty of other far easier, far cheesier ways to get dorudugan, but I like this because while it certainly is cheesy, it feels like you still have to work for it a bit (getting all the items and coordinating the chaining debuffs) and is satisfying as a result, versus just hammering Dorudugan down with axe modal and blade cascade, or attritioning it out with gouging strike's endless DoT. Plus, outside of dorudugan, you can do this against most bosses in the game (very few enemies in my memory are actually immune to dexterity afflictions, they tend to just be resistant) without needing as many accuracy bonuses, so it can serve as a decent strategy across your entire run if you feel like slightly cheesing out a harder boss encounter.

Really cool breakdown and strategy, thanks @thelee!

For those who aren't aware (I know you are) perma-paralyzing Doru is also achievable with Grave Calling (Grave Bound enchant) in a more exploitative but simpler fashion. Doru should in theory resist Paralyze which would be demoted to Immobilize, but in practice Grave Bound works differently for some obscure reason/bug.

[dgray62]

Doesn't Grave Calling actually petrify, so that it is downgraded to paralysis?

[Not So Clever Hound]

2 hours ago, dgray62 said:

Doesn't Grave Calling actually petrify, so that it is downgraded to paralysis?

Nope, the in-game effect is called "Paralyzed (Frozen)". It seems to be a uniquely implemented effect.

Edited November 21, 2021 by Not So Clever Hound

[Boeroer]

It works like a petrify. It's essentially a tier 4 DEX affliction that gets reduced to tier 3 (paralyze) by DEX resistance.

It has no effect against DEX-affliction immune enemies. 

Afaik no megaboss is immune to DEX afflictions though, only resistant.

Edited November 21, 2021 by Boeroer

[NotDumbEnough]

Eccea's Arcane Blaster also has a petrify effect via upgrade.. Also useful since it doesn't have penetration issues versus Dorudugan.

[Constentin Lévine]

Do you think with a chanter's skeketons and Frostball you can perma paralyze Dorudugan?

I made a topic on it but is pretty useless in most of fight, but here? This is the link

Edit :

Edited November 21, 2021 by Constentin Lévine

[thelee]

it might be very hard to get a net gain on the petrify, right? +20% on the debuff after accounting for attack speed, you'd need to make sure the petrify on dorudugan has ~10s left at minimum. but it seems doable, as an alternate strat.

edit: if you have two wizards and are willing to save scum a bit, one does the arkemyr's wondrous torment, then the other follows up with an empowered petrification, if that lands with a hit you might have enough starting duration on that petrify to get a net gain of time with each death from frostfall (you'd still need a lot of accuracy to put yourself in any appreciable hit range against fortitude without doing the whole morningstar/whatever bit), so long as you are able to kill a skeleton with each attack. then you don't have to worry about refreshing anything else. 

Edited November 21, 2021 by thelee

[Constentin Lévine]

I found another way to paralyse Dorudugan but with targetting will. He has 167 (152+15 PodT) Will that can be reduced to :

• -25 club modal, -8 keeper of the flame aroma, -10 ngati's tusk ... 124
• -10 ben fidel's neck, -40 miasma or arkemyr's wondrous torment ... 74
• -15/-30 Boeroer's willbreaker retentless ... 59/44

The Eye of Wael Lidless Gaze petrify for an equal duration to Embrace the earth talon, target will and benefice from +15acc to weapon legendary upgrade, and The hundred Visions PL boost (illusion), your acc buffs but not from The empty Soul (cipher). Duration depend of your Int and PL stack. And from crit, "overriding" the 25 resolve of the iron giant.

It could be more easy to extend, doesnt?

For the Willbraeker debuff :

 

Edited November 22, 2021 by Constentin Lévine

[thelee]

15 hours ago, Constentin Lévine said:

The Eye of Wael Lidless Gaze petrify for an equal duration to Embrace the earth talon, target will and benefice from +15acc to weapon legendary upgrade, and The hundred Visions PL boost (illusion), your acc buffs but not from The empty Soul (cipher). Duration depend of your Int and PL stack. And from crit, "overriding" the 25 resolve of the iron giant.

is the wiki wrong? lidless gaze is listed at 6s, which would put it at a lower duration than embrace, same with gaze of the adragan.

even if you have tons of easy ways to nerf dorudugan's will and make it easy to roll a crit, a +25% multiplier would still yield a base duration that's less than embrace the earth talon (the bonus illusion PL might help bump it up).

petrification has a substantial base duration (12s) which would make it easier to start off the fight at a level where you can start extending it with frostfall.

 

the ugly math: dorudugan at 25 resolve is a -45% duration penalty, which turns into a  -.8182 duration modifier (inversion math). if you have 25 intellect, say (18 base + inspiration + some items), you have a .75 duration modifier. you're left with a net -.0682, which translates into a -6.4% duration penalty. let's assume that it's easy to get +5 PL for petrification, and you can still cobble +11 PL for lidless gaze.

petrification hit => 12 * .936 (net duration penalty) * 1.25 (PL) => 14.04s
lidless hit => 6 * .936 (net duration penalty) * 1.55 (PL) => 8.7s
lidless crit => 6 * .936 * 1.55 * 1.25 => 10.9s

+20% off 10s seems pretty tight margin for error and attacks, but maybe it's doable with enough save scumming to make everything works out. (you'd have to save-scum any other approach with the frostfall angle as well anyway since you probably wouldn't be getting the full suite of your debuffs going)

 

edit: in case anyone wanted a clear illustration of resolve's increasing returns and why arkemy'rs wondrous torment is so important:

at 25 resolve, that -.8182 duration modifier can essentially be explained as saying "you need +81.82% in total buffs to duration just to get to your effect's normal base duration". Approximately doable, with reasonably high intellect.

at 35 resolve, the -75% duration multiplier turns into a whopping -3.00 duration modifier. You need +300% in total buffs just to get back to your normal base duration! Even with completely maxed out intellect, you're still left with a substantial negative penalty, at which point all the multipliers from PL and crits are trying to boost an extremely small remaining duration and not getting you very far.

Edited November 23, 2021 by thelee