Strategy for [Spoiler]

[timtom]

Anyone able to beat the Shadow boss at the end of level 4?

Trying on normal difficulty. Post July 21 patch.

Party Kane, Maeve, Aeric, Whisper

Kane is tank, 28 armor before spells, 28 life including items, around 50% resistance across the board, 3 health per second regen from items

Maeve is DPS, 30 speed after items, using Crossbow not from this World, which is only source of armor pen at 21 also has elemental shatter 2 for -20% resistance for 5 seconds. boss has 60 armor, so she isn't doing much. using the fire arrows with rate of fire increase and arrow barrage with blinding, maxed hunter's mark.

Aeric is support, 26 mastery after items. maxed summon elemental w/ taunt to draw fire, and healing totem. offhand has elemental shatter 1. using death's wand on main hand, but boss is probably immune to daze so should switch to another elemental shatter (do those stack?)

Whisper is magic DPS, 35 mastery after items, chest and pants have ethereal absorbtion 1 and character has 366 MP 3.9 mana regen normally, which gives about 11 mana regen per second. off hand is quick goldstone of magic for +11% skill damage. use suffication dome 2/3 2/3 with the 60% slow, main damage is constantly casting max elemental barrage with the +3 bolts upgrade, 46 elemental damage per bolt, not counting the offhand skill damage bump and the + and - resists active on the boss.

I can get the boss down to slightly below 10k health (of ~22 or 24k), but then it powers up for a void DOT aura that wears Kane down pretty fast (who before then is basically unkillable) and kills the magic tower and elemental summons. At this point the boss also gets a ranged 100 damage void missle that is bad news for the casters. maybe there is a way to interrupt that, or block it with the create wall.

Most of my equipment is tier one, so one option is to farm the challenges and get all tier 2 items, which should increase the main stats of all characters by about 5 (going from stat +1 to stat +2) and make Kane's armor and resist even higher, but won't affect void damage which appears to be the main problem.

I haven't completed a couple of the side quests, including the whisp amulet quest (can't find the aqua aquis to put out the torches in the fire area) the reward to which might be some void protection, so that is another option.

[greenbrog]

Killed on epic.

After the patch. This boss is actually hard. I don't use shadow, and replace with boron. Whom is an absolute damage train.

My 32 mastery kane can heal/hot massive amounts while throwing up walls in u shapes to force the boss to move out of void puddles (res and armor in this fight dont really matter as he does void damage) spamming his level 6 spell for threat, he has armor shatter on his flame sword (not reducing the armor for his damage, as he does garbage anyway). Taunt with the flame aura on spam lets him actually maintain aggro; he'd have a 40 mastery if I'd know the patch changes before and would not have spent any points on might, like I had nbeen doing. Pretty key is getting health on his (not life so much) boots, helm, chest and so forth; and using 2x1% health per second armor/leg enchant. 600 HP is 12 health a second, dealing with the high dps of the unmitigatable damage is a healing race. While normally his most important spell for him is his (now) group armor and res buff I drop it from this fight because the shaodw can't be mitigated and I use the wall instead.

Maeve is an absolute power house and the fact that she is ranged means she has near 100% uptime for dps with a maxxed out fire shot and hunters mark. I go 1st pure might with her (using the not of this world bow) and once maxxed out start to buy speed. % mana and health on armor and legs will go a long way to keeping her fire buff and mark with max cd uptime and help her recover for a hit, but she can't take 2 in a row.

Aeric has maxx level/duration healing totem, with 20% cooldown meaning hes got 19/24 seconds of his healing totem which can give almost enough healing to keep kane and boron at 100% through all but puddles. Otherwise he's not doing much, keeps his damage buff and water elemental up as much as possible for a little extra dps, the elemental shatter from the crossbow is going to be hard to top. So his weapon enchants aren't really meaningful, mana on hit and life on hit will make him a little more resilient if he takes a hit but he can't take 2 in a row.

Lastly is Boron, the indestructble juggernaught. With the bug/change to blind rage, he can be directed to get out of puddles meaning his maxxed might and sitting on 40 armor pen with dual wield 10.7 dps 1h swords has his in town dps sitting around 50 dps (after nerfs) after the armor shatter from kane he's doing 100% damage, I use dual life leech on him; but could switch to the bleed effect. Aggro is a real issue as he generate a lot being melee and is the top dps, have to keep taunting off him, but with 500 hp he can take a few hits and with the leech and healing totem it provides ample healing when spreading the hits between him and kane.

Fight require massive micro manageing, and since he's immune to control, and we don't have a push or pull using either one of the rocks to break los or creative use of kane's wall will allow you to move the boss out of the void zones. It's still a long fight and sustained physical damage is the best option. The devs said they'd make hp and armor pen important and here's an example.

There is probably a way to use the runemaster and shadow instead of maeve and boron, using the runemaster to strip off the ele res low enough to keep shadow meaningful, but I perfer the "ignore the armor" approach and using physical dps.

This level of mircomanagement and min/maxxing probably isn't required for anything but epic.

I hide maeve and boron in the corner and let kane generate some aggro with aeric keeping him up for the first 5% making it much harder for maeve to pull aggro and delaying boron pulling aggro until around stage 2 for the first time. Needless to say I did not kill him 1st try.

[timtom]

Wow, that's great information, thank you.

Didn't know about the % life per second enchants. Do you know of any way to get/farm them if I have already picked up all the dusty scrolls? I tried save scumming the enchants, but found that save scumming only worked on the random stat increase/decrease ones. Maybe I am wrong about that, though.

I'll have to wait for the ability score reset patch to try out a Might Maeve (instead of Speed). Might (with its armor penetration secondary effect) seems like the better option now that boss armor can be much higher.

Having the fire aura with Kane's taunt is smart too. I was using the other side effect (and my Kane is all Life, so is doing basically no damage) and would have to freak out every 20 seconds when the boss would retarget and taunt was still cooling down.

[greenbrog]

the enchants should be on the ground where they drop, I beleive they pu the % health on near the book shelves on level 1 after the door, but I don't remember, you can recollect all the enchants that got changed (though you don't actually have too) and any new one is now in it's location, just like the new chests, and a couple fight even. Might need to recollect the all res chest enchat to have it work for your shield. the spell power chest enchant works on shields too, but probably isn't worth useing until tier 3/4 gear to make up for the res you're not gaining from the res enchant. The attack/move speed amulet enchant now works on rings and though it reads wrong it's excellent, and works making it worth figuring out how to get 3 of them on any attack dps char, like boron or meave. Purple jewlery is rare though and reaching the 40 stat cap is really powerful, because the 39 to 40 point change is bascially worth the entire 25-39 point range. So using a green +2 ring will probably be better than a epic but wrong stat ring to get the enchant. Example: my boron is running 3 of the enchant because he is duel wield and you need 7.5 tier 2 out of 10 items (when duel weilding) to get the +15 stat (might in this case) to reach 40 from the 25 base stat cap. Meaning he need tier 2 might on only 7.5 of his items, so ha has a life ring, a +1 might ring and his neck has only res and cd, and +2 might on every other slot

my kane isn't even min/max, I have about 8 pints I spent on might I need to move to mastery, and then life. I like the fire sword for him because it has the near.5 attack speed and skill damage up to 20%, he's definantly a caster after the patch; shield are just too good for him 9 armor 22res (with enchant) and 2 mastery is too good to give up. Going phys feels like an all or nothing with how armor works and the majority of your pen coming from might. Can't go both ways because speed maximizes ele damage better. His buffs become kinda crazy with high mastery, and his level 6 skill can break 400 damage, making it a no los/no rang limit/nuke/taunt, because it counts for double threat.

Boron has to figure out how to not use one, and most of the time, kane's armor/res aura is his shield; I put Boron on his 50% of a map and he stays on his island and the other 3 take everything else, normally positioning maeve to help either boron or kane, whomever needs it more.

Bug-Don't touch the explosives for the orc boss on level 2 they will have respawned and if you do the orc boss will "spawn" charge and freeze your game.

[Event Horizon]

You beat the shadow on epic? !!! Wow. I really would like to see your save game - could you please use REPORT ISSUE and put a title - "I BEAT THE SHADOW". We will get your save and your logs.

[timtom]

I farmed items for a while to get all tier 2 stat improvements and 10%/10% cooldown reduction weapons for the casters, etc., switched Maeve's items from speed to might.

There is an item glitch (which I begrudgingly reported through the in-game menu :) ) that let's you use enchants from one item type on items of another type, as long as the target item type doesn't have any enchants. I used this to get %health/%mana on hat and boots (and Kane's shield). This gave Kane about 50 health per second (Kane has high 700s hit points) and let whisper cast elemental barrage pretty much non stop. Whisper also used the air sphere that has 90% slow which is constantly up thanks to cooldown reduction. With that and taunts and such, I was able to beat shadow on epic.

I suspect the strategy would at least get close without the glitched items, as i never had to use healing totem or the wall or Kane's healing skill.

[greenbrog]

Tested your bug... hope that's fixed soon. 2 easy.

Though it is proof that in the future when you get access to even the tier 2 of that enchant (which looks like it'll be 2%?). you could legit get 4% regen. Either way about 50 health/second and 60% slow (90 is even better) looks like the point you need to stand there and not move. He's not overly dynamic, just a lot of HP and constant unmitigateble damage.

I wouldn't save killing it, With the prompt before fighting him I have no idea how his fight is integrated into the story long term. Maybe you're not supposed to kill him.

Haven't been able to repeat my previous legit kill yet. It was very time consuming and it felt a bit like and exploit with the pathing issues. Running back and forth behind a rock for 10 minutes using one skill to gain aggro and repeating when I got low on resources and let them regen while I LOS kite was both boring and tedious. Spoke too soon, I did it again.

[timtom]

I kept a save from before the fight, thanks.

Yea, the glitched items are way too strong, but in my defense I was overwhelmed by the power when I found the bug. I'm not looking forward to re-farming for worse items :) . Maybe I will after a little while.

I appreciate all your information, definitely gave me the motivation to give it a shot.

[Sladi]

I killed it on normal using Rakhem (Runelord), Maeve (Marksman), Aeric (Druid), and Whisper (Mystic) using the same general idea that greenbrog mentioned toward the end of his physical dps post.

The entire rotation was damaging for 10 seconds and kiting for 20 seconds. The setup was using the Runlord's blinding cone upgraded for max elemental weakness (it was -113% to all elemental resits with the 17 mastery he had, including gear). This gave me 10 seconds to unload spells with the boss at -57% resits. I also used the druid AOE root to keep the boss in one place during this burst, which allowed me to use stationary AOEs like Whisper's dome and Maeve's air totem witohut my tank having to absorb a lot of damage.

In between rotations I would use the rocks to kite and avoid the bolts from the boss.

I lost Maeve with the boss at about 50% because I wanted to see how long I could keep firing without kiting and failed the test.

My characters were not min/maxed because I wanted to test a playthrough of the new patch with no "savescumming" and the Runelord as a tank. My highest DPS on a character page was Maeve with 26.0.

I think it could be done at a higher difficulty with the same party, but it would require some gear and stat optimization.

*edit* I think I would use the triple shot elemental artifact crossbow if I played this at a higher level. I had been using it a lot after picking it up and it felt strong when combined with the Runelord's cone stripping resists (and putting them into negatives). I stopped using it and made it into crystals because it was weak against air resistant enemies when the resist strip was not up. Hindsight is 20/20.

[Jaeja]

For anyone else still looking for the aqua aquis like I was (this is the only text reference to it I can find on the internet): it's in a small fountain right next to the fire altar. Not the magic fountain around the corner, but a little wall fountain literally two inches to the right of the altar.

[greenbrog]

This is a dead thread, really everything in it is so dated its meaningless.

[Ger]

Originally posted by greenbrog:

This is a dead thread, really everything in it is so dated its meaningless.

What was even the point of your post? I did a search for Aqua Aquis and it led me here and answered my question. So it's not as meaningless as your post.