How to beat this?

[Panchy]

https://imgur.com/a/qJYBdYh

Researching blood 8 or spamming soul slay is the only answer I know, and those don't work for most factions. It's funny that Dom 6 is trying to be more about armies and there's still these army-wiping thugs walking around.

[BadCub]

I'll take a stab. It says that he is weak to lightning, so would that work? Maybe mass smite? Dropping a meteor on it? Decay? What nation are you playing as?

[Mormacil]

Dom6 is more about the armies, not about entirely nullifying these kind of SCs.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

That's trivial to deal with, honestly. I mean I guess it's semi-hardened against a posse of guys with greatswords of sharpness mixed in among some distracto-chaff, but I'd say that's still viable. More realistically, like, it still has shockvuln so some fire-resistant chaff (probably a few casts of Nest of Salamanders) and a small handful of Lightning Bolt casters would do it. Swap out Lightning Bolt for Dust to Dust, or Maggots according to what you have access to. Throw in Ravenous Swarm if you can/want.

Or just hit it with enough Soul Slays, yeah, MR 25 is decent but far from impenetrable even without any kind of penboost.

I mean yeah it takes a bit of investment, but like, this is at least alt 7 research for Phoenix Pyre and then ~110 gems worth of gear and Twiceborn casts, all to die to a dozen mages and a handful of gems spent on chaff generation.

[Bumc]

Pretty sure like 5 lightning elementals will kill/stun this thing before it gets all the buffs up even if fire shield is first in the script.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

oh wait lol it's even worse, laestrygonians only get air as a 10% random, so this is either an extremely rare path roll or it's a hundred and sixty gems, once you count the empower. And still dies to less than a dozen mages and half a dozen gems of spellcasting.

Plus like... You deploy this on its own, it gets ganked, you deploy this as part of an army, what does it really do? It's a fear aura and four bonks a round, I can get the same capacity with 20 gems spent on a hat and a couple swords of sharpness, backed by the buffs the army gets anyway.

[Kamiyama]

Originally posted by Bumc:

Pretty sure like 5 lightning elementals will kill/stun this thing before it gets all the buffs up even if fire shield is first in the script.

I agree. Given that that thing has air magic, he's probably casting air shield at the start of battle. Ranged spells like lightning bolt use precision and would get nullified.

Spamming air elementals would be a good way to deal with it, but you need mages with A3 and some air gems. The question is how many. They have 15 attack versus his 18 defense, and are going to take losses because he hits hard.

If you don't have air mages, any D1 mage can cast dust to dust which will deal 22 AN damage if they pass a MR check, and 11 guaranteed AN damage if they fail the MR check. Since dust to dust uses an MR check, precision is not a factor and air shield won't stop it.

You can queue it 5 times, so that's at least 55 damage per mage. Assuming they survive 5 turns.

You will probably have to mix some chaff in there. Form a front line of cheap garbo units, then have your mages summon air elementals or cast dust to dust.

[Kamiyama]

Yeah if you have recruitable death mages you could probably kill him with 0 gems. Just chaff units up front and death mages in the back firing off dust to dust.

His greatest weakness is being undead.

[Janohito]

Yes, as already mentioned, it really depends on what you have access to - soul slay/ enslave mind with extra penetration items for S mages, ravenous swarm for N ones, dust to dust for D ones and of course lightning evocations for A mages. Also thugs with something like gate cleaver/flamebeau could work.

[Sombre]

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

Originally posted by Bumc:

Pretty sure like 5 lightning elementals will kill/stun this thing before it gets all the buffs up even if fire shield is first in the script.

I agree. Given that that thing has air magic, he's probably casting air shield at the start of battle. Ranged spells like lightning bolt use precision and would get nullified.

I don't think air shield works on lightning bolt (which does not use a projectile).

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

I agree. Given that that thing has air magic, he's probably casting air shield at the start of battle. Ranged spells like lightning bolt use precision and would get nullified.

Air shield only nullifies spells that use a projectile and have an AoE of one person; it's valid against fire darts, but not fireball or lightning bolt.

[Kamiyama]

Originally posted by Ddraig Lleuad:

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

I agree. Given that that thing has air magic, he's probably casting air shield at the start of battle. Ranged spells like lightning bolt use precision and would get nullified.

Air shield only nullifies spells that use a projectile and have an AoE of one person; it's valid against fire darts, but not fireball or lightning bolt.

Air shield doesn't block AOE? I didn't know that. Thank you!

[Zan]

A good spell to start fighting any tough undead unit is Ravenous Swarm. Its about 21AN mundane damage per turn aoe1 once it lands on the right target. Body Ethereal protects against it somewhat, but its still nice chip damage if you can cast it.

Otherwise against that particular undead I would recommend lightning damage where possible. Flying fire resistant units help too to avoid damage from the phoenix pyre and to quickly resume hitting the target. Axe of hate(1h/N) and the new star of darkness(1h/D) provide fatigue on DAMAGE as well.

There is a lot of investment in that SC, so feel free to invest as much or more to take it out.

[TheMeInTeam]

phoenix pyre + soul vortex on D2 versions of this means you have to be careful. air elementals will stunlock it, but it has fire shield up, so they could easily die before working through enough pyre fatigue if something is feeding soul vortex. you'd need a lot to overcome pyre + fire shield even with regen.

without vortex, it has much less staying power vs living armies and even just weapons of sharpness + some fire resistance will let a group of scales troops tear through the prot (16 effective protection vs sharpness). big earth mage can petrify it too. while it will probably pass the mr check to avoid dying, it can't swing or dodge attacks while petrified.

concentrated mage battery will kill it using many different paths, though it will cost a fair amount of chaff to buy time. i don't think fr is high enough even, it will only successfully block cold and poison most likely.

ravenous swarm will add significant damage pressure to it (AN per round, no resists or rolls to negate it). not enough to beat regen, but just putting this up strips more than half of its regen.

going path by path:

fire - i think it has < 10 fire resist, so you can incinerate or pillar through it. in numbers, they would kill if offscript works.

air - lightning bolt. lightning bolt. lightning bolt. (like that guy in the video). or air elementals, but concentrated lightning bolts will easily outpace regen and don't cost much fatigue.

water - having normal undead cr, it will block frozen heart. being undead, cleansing water deals armor-negating damage with no save, so enough water mages will overpower regen in principle. unlike star fires, mages will actually cast it if you aren't using undead.

unlike air elementals, water elementals have 10 fire resistance. if you put quickness on water elementals in your army (much easier in dom 6 than dom 5), as large creatures they will wade to the front through troops. each one will hit target with 8x 18 damage armor piercing crush attacks per round. a couple of these will pound through the prot + hp in short order, and they're not exactly bad in army vs army fights. ice elementals are not as good.

earth - too bad it's not inanimate, but beat it to death with sharpness boosted weapons + petrify big stuff is a standard earth army gameplan and nothing on this guy fully shuts it down.

astral - star fires is buggy crap. the target has too much mr for soul slay to work easily off script. too bad for him he is undead. decent sized astral communion with light of northern star up can blast through the prot with solar rays.

death - dust to dust now has an mr check. but it's for half damage, so any decent number of death mages spamming this spell will still rapidly overwhelm regen and kill it.

nature - ravenous swarm might be reasonable, but you'd have to expect this thing and script extremely carefully to use maggots given the gem cost + limited range on it. not very practical. unless i'm mistaken pure nature by itself would have the hardest time, although in real games no nation is fielding only a single school, and swarm is still a useful support spell.

glamour - how does false damage interact with pyre? regen is useless vs false damage, but i don't know enough about the mechanical interactions to make recommendations.

blood - there are multiple options. life for life spam is an option, but stuff like storm demons or lifelong protection screen + support also help a lot.

holy - lol @ holy countering strong undead. although if you happen to have a nature bless, random h1s won't have anything better to cast so you could send some in for the (very) small chance the sc fails final rest's easy to negate kill check. it will take hundreds of casts for it to have good odds of success (around 500 for 80% odds), but these are not zero odds, so if you know it will be somewhere these guys can go, can at least give them a look. usually won't be practical. other banishes are practically worthless against this sc.

[Alias]

Originally posted by Panchy:

https://imgur.com/a/qJYBdYh

Researching blood 8 or spamming soul slay is the only answer I know, and those don't work for most factions. It's funny that Dom 6 is trying to be more about armies and there's still these army-wiping thugs walking around.

You can learn how to soften and then kill them here https://youtu.be/6PRVrt3iXoo?si=xiUTrwfYuOylVSaJ

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by TheMeInTeam:

air elementals will stunlock it, but it has fire shield up, so they could easily die before working through enough pyre fatigue

The idea with air elementals is you summon them quick enough that they arrive before the titan gets fire shield up. It'd depend on the script, but it's a viable answer.

Originally posted by TheMeInTeam:

glamour - how does false damage interact with pyre? regen is useless vs false damage, but i don't know enough about the mechanical interactions to make recommendations.

Not viable. False damage is all MRneg, and unlike soul slay you need to get lucky a lot more than once.