Azmodane (Ferarri) and I (MrBrownstone) attempted the Iron Man version of the taming quest. We went into the quest with the intention of kiting and drawing the reptile and beast master's pets off killing them one by one. It went well at first till we discovered the bosses ability to recall his pets worked from afar. I think we lost around four expendable dragons and rezed our bonded pairs once. We were able to clear the first two stages and loot both chests. We made our way over to the spectrals and killed a few before our two hour timer ran out.
Did one of you have Disco or Provo? I think the ideal builds for this would be one Disco Tamer, and one Archer-Tamer. Heck, maybe two warrior-tamers. You just need to put out damage faster than pets can do it, to finish in time.
Neither of us has Disco. Lore done on the bosses from prior quests with and without disco results were not overly impressive to me. Wish now I had screen shot the lore gumps. I have a pure Bard (tested out Bardic Arts in prior quests) and all Provo attempts have failed with GM or slayers. Even if it were possible to Provo the boss or his spawn, he seems to be able to redirect his pets aggro (very frequently and only onto you or your teammate) which adds a nice twist. If you hide the boss will reveal you and tele one of his pets right to you. Whomever conjured up the AI did a damn good job. I thought of Archery but I'm casting usually so much that I'd hardly have a bow equiped (heals, cures). May have to revisit the Disco idea and see how affective it is in terms of reduced damage to your pets and the time it takes to drop the boss with it on. Four dragons and two mares all trained do really good damage with a slight decline once they run low on mana. The bosses poison (hard part of keeping pets cured/healed) seems to be level five and they're very successful at poisoning. Just the boss by themselves isn't hard for two people... it's all about killing off the bosses pets first. That was the time consuming part.
Telamon said we were the first to give it a try! We're hoping to try again after we've had a chance to come up with a better strategy and maybe tweak our templates.
Aye, thanks for sharing your experience. Les and I have plans to make the attempt on our tamers. He's Provo and I'm Disco (formerly Disco/Provo) but I dropped Provo for Med. Good luck in your subsequent attempt!
Ah, I see. Yeah if I remember, the bosses had very high dex and very low weapon skills. So they whiff a lot. But still, if you happen to disco them on the first or second try, that's 20% less time it will take to kill them, just from the HP drop alone. And you're also dropping their weapon swings by 10%, the damage they do by a bit, etc. Disco and Music is really easy to add to a tamer template, so it's probably worth a try. The weapon skill idea takes a lot more of a template change, and as you mention may be impractical with all the spellcasting. Perhaps the answer is two Disco tamers to have the best chance of getting these things discorded quickly. One other thing I have wondered about is purple potions. They do a lot of damage, and I assume they do full damage to these monsters. The other thing is a macer. If you hit the enemies enough, you will slow their swings down to a crawl. Then you can focus a bit more on offense, since you'll need to heal your pets less.
Actually, if I'm right that the enemies have very low weapon skill, you should basically auto-hit them with any GM weaponskill. Maybe the route here is one disco tamer to tank, one Vet-Macer or Vet-Archer to potentially do even more damage than 2 dragons and a mare.
Nice try, guys. Looking forward to seeing screen shots of your next, and hopefully successful, attempt.
