Catacombs Of Kathandrax..

I completed the dungeon yesterday in Hard Mode with heroes and henchmen as a 600/Smite ranger. It took me a long long time but the boss was a pushover even if by the time I got there me and most of my team were at 60%dp.

I'm not sure if I would recommend this approach, because of how long it took, maybe I'm just not very good at the 600/Smite thing.

The builds I used were

Ranger (Me), wearing nothing but lowest AL pants, Staff with 20% enchant
[skill]protective spirit[/skill] [skill]spirit bond[/skill] [skill]shield of absorption[/skill] [skill]melandru's resilience[/skill] [skill]light of deldrimor[/skill] [skill]radiation field[/skill] [skill]pain inverter[/skill] [skill]essence bond[/skill]

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Hero - Monk 1
[skill]blood ritual[/skill][skill]blessed signet[/skill][skill]spell breaker[/skill][skill]smite condition[/skill][skill]blessed aura[/skill][skill]balthazar's spirit[/skill][skill]holy wrath[/skill][skill]retribution[/skill]

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I'd use dismiss condition or mend condition instead of smite condition next time, not sure what I was thinking.

Monk 2

[skill]blood is power[/skill][skill]blessed signet[/skill][skill]mend condition[/skill][skill]watchful spirit[/skill][skill]vital blessing[/skill][skill]life attunement[/skill][skill]mending[/skill][skill]succor[/skill]

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Monk 3 - WoH monk with BR and condition removal

[skill]blood ritual[/skill][skill]word of healing[/skill][skill]Orison of Healing[/skill][skill]heal party[/skill][skill]remove hex[/skill][skill]dismiss condition[/skill][skill]dwayna's Kiss[/skill][skill]mend condition[/skill]

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Henchies
Lo Sha, Cynn, Herta, Eve: Eve has BR also, and I wanted only ranged heroes with only resurrection signet. That way hen the signets are exhausted when I die we all automatically rez to portal.

How this works....

Just lay all the enchantments, have the monk cast an extra long spell breaker on you and engage everything alone. Easy enough.


Problem areas...

Wurms - I dealt with the wurms kby attacking with monk 3 and the henchies and casting pain inverter. Usually worked well enough.

Forge Masters - Forge masters have backbreaker and I assume they gain adrenaline faster in HM. The KD for 4 secs can be enough to kill you if you cant refresh SB. IF I had to do the dungeon again I might drop Light of Deldrimor for "I am unstopable" or maybe switch one of the monks to Mo/Rt and lay down soothing. Usually casting Radiation Field right away and focusing pain inverter on them did the trick though.

Cave Aloe - At the start of level 2 I had to pull and kill the ethers and blisters carefully, and when enough were dead I had to send the other henchies to engage the cave aloes and remaining 1 or 2 magma blisters. These buggers were tough to kill. I might replace one of the Henchies with Zho for the interrupts if I had to do it again.

Nasty group - ather the locked door in level two in the first room with lava and wurms there was a nasty group of 3 forge masters, 3 Djinns, 2 Ethers. I simply couldnt kill them. However, I was able to go kill the wurms and walk though the lava to go around them. IN the next room it's easy enough to pull the imps and then kill the wurms.

Becalmed Djinn - in level 3 I initially spawned right on top of one. So... tougher time for sure. I assume that with HnH it's pretty impossible not to kill them.

Needling beasties - Even when I was completely naked and wearing only pants, these buggers use needling shot and forked arrow. They don't do enough damage to trigger spirit bond. I'm not sure what to do about them... I ended up putting my armor back on and pseudo tanking while the rest of my henchies nuked. I had many many deaths in this area.

Flame Djinn - You can't solo kill him because of his touch skill that steals 400 life if you're alone. I ended up casting vital blessing on as many team members as I could and engaging him in as tight a group as possible, killed him using pain inverter. Use the flag to keep the group tight.

Isulndur - He was easy, you can maintain the enchantments on yourself while the heroes are sill at the shrine. Just lay down the enchantments and go kill him alone. Doable at 60%dp in one go.

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So there. I'm pretty sure I'm never going back to that dungeon again (all I got was a crappy water wand and a diamond). I'm not sure if this sucks or if there's something there for more experienced smiters to work with.

For those of you with GW coin to spare do yourselves a favor and just buy a bunch of Grails, essences, Armors, and power stones to power through this dungeon with another build.

havent tried this dungeon yet and i was wondering what i should go as for my necro?

Got sv,ss, and basically all the main elites and setups thru all the campaigns I just dont want to be unprepared...any advice? I hate the fact of doing something for 2 hrs then not able to finish like a lot of the stories ive read here

If you want to prepare, go fight the djinns and ethers in Hidden city and go clear the fire area outside Kathandrax (in NM or HM as you wish depending on which you're doing the dungeon in). If you do well enough with those you should do alright in the dungeon.

i can deal w/ the djinns easily enough but i was refering to advice for a build for the end boss islundur

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The thing that is killing me is that the henchmen keep running the fire bombs back to the group and killing everyone. I can not believe that someone in testing did not find this problem.

Is there some way for flag the henchmen / hero so they do not run the Firebombs back to me. (And I do not feel like playing with people, long dungeon means by the time you reach it you are down to four people because half have left.)

It should be no problem to flag away the heroes. Unfortunately you can't do this with henchen. They just ball up in one place and blow up afterwards. Gives me always a headache if I have to fight against elementalists/other AoE-damage sources.

All you can do is flag them away (in the direction you were coming from) from the boss. The best thing that could happen is that the henchman with the bomb dies and the rest of your group survives, but it gives the boss engough time to finish off your group in that time, too. AI monks don't heal if you set a flag until they reach the destination or order them to do so.

Just did this last night on hard mode. After a shaking start to the dungeon we got to grips with it and was easy enough. We had one obsi tank dervish, bha ranger with winter, echo SH ele, Ward against harm water ele, 2 monks (1 hero) paragon hero and mesmer interrupt hero (excellent for shutting down all those fire eles)

Boss was ok, we wiped a couple of times but kept chipping away at his health until dead no real dramas.

Ok, i just tried this again, and got nowhere.
First time i tried with was with Sab's build ... didnt cut it.
Not really enough corpses for MM's, and the burning from various fire creatures was hard to deal with.

So, this last time, the team was me as Warrior with standard sword skills, took along Pain Inverter for good measure ... Hero's were 2 BHA Rangers, Paragon support build, 2 Hench Monks, Hench Mesmer and Hench Earth.
Made it to the boss with no wipes, but the boss pwned us. I dont think i ever got the Boss below 75% Health.
Ridiculous.
Once DP was at 60%, i gave up. Wipes were instant after that.
Nevermind the rolling fireballs, or the fire bombs ... that damn Shield of Fire skill is murder. You can see immediately when he uses it cause the team health bars drop to 50% immediately.
Mind you, both attempts were in Normal Mode!
Anyway, point of this post was to point out that the buffed boss is STILL buffed, so dont plan on heading in there with any normal builds.

So now it appears that, to combat this dungeon, ill either need to refit necro's with set from another post in here, or refit my SF ele's with a Water Based build and take along a monk or a healer Rit.

Crazy Dungeon ... once i beat NM and HM, ill be avoiding this one for a long time.

NM i used para-way, it was almost too simple :P.

Motivation Paragon Cautery Signet/Remedy Signet spammer - to get rid of burning from everyone (other goodies too), Command/warrior Paragon: Armor buffs mostly and i was mostly Spear. Third hero, hmm, it was probably a curses necro. All deaths in the boss fight were caused the "The Great Balls of Fire".

on HM that didn't work, typical bha/ranger & curses necro and a bonder. After we went trough it, my problem wasn't the AoE, the mesmers or the Boss but the Forge Masters - they can kill a monk in 2-3 hits. If a PS is cast too late, it's too late by then. Even with bonding they sometimes managed to score a kill from our backline. But at the boss fight, we died to bombs & balls. The boss has a high natural regen and he gets health from each spell he casts so, you cant afford to fully wipe many times. HnH makes dodging the balls a micro-managing hell sometimes but you can do it .

edit: oh and HM Flame Djinn > End boss with ease. Now that was brutal.

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heh i just made it up. I cant remember the exact builds anymore but there was no ursan though. I havent saved them either it seems.

Something like this:

Aria of Restoration & Ballad of Restoration - on motivation para and used by me.
Cautery Signet (Motiv. Paragon)
Remedy Signet (Motiv. Paragon)
Go for the Eyes! (P/W) (Motiv. Paragon) (on Me)
Stand Your Ground! (on P/W)
Watch Yourself! (on P/W)
Defensive Anthem (on P/W)

Cruel Spear (used by me)
Lightning Spear (used by me)
Aggressive Refrain (used by me).

there's some skills missing that i cant remember but i think those were the major skills we used there, at least one of the missing ones is an attack skill for each paragon. sorry about that ;P. edit: i think the 3rd hero was an bha ranger afterall, seem to have that kind of feeling.

Any suggestions for this on HM? I usually go as a SF ele, but obviously this build would not work well here.

Also, if anyone wants to try this on HM - let me know the time. I'm at work untill about 630 pm EST, but I'm game after that. I've beaten Vloxen, Orr, and Slaver's Exile on HM already plus some of the easier ones. I need this one, but i haven't tried it yet on HM - NM wasn't too bad.

Ward Against Harm / Maelstrom build is a no-brainer as ele here. The dungeon is a drag with H/H in HM - I did it with the 2 warrior 1 paragon set-up detailed earlier in this thread. That team build goes for boss shutdown at the expense of pretty much everything else, so Ilsundar was a total pushover, but the rest of the dungeon was a complete PITA.

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Did this dungeon yesterday in HM. I was with two other people, the rest of the party was heroes. Only really tough part of the dungeon are the groups with 2-3 SF spirits. Pulling can be pretty tricky cause some of the mobs don't always pull to where you want them and sometimes when you arrow a single target it brings waaaayy too many monsters for the group to handle. Only wiped a couple of times. Our group was the following:

D/mo - Avatar of Dwayna (prot spirit, rof for tanking)
N/me - SS necro with pain inverter
E/mo - Shatterstone
E/mo - SH with pain inverter
Me/rt - Power Block with a fomf hard rez
R - Magebane shot
Mo - LoD
Mo - ZB

Ilsundur seemed much easier this time in HM than in normal mode for some reason. Maybe it was because we knew what to expect this time around after doing it in noob mode before. We didn't wipe once, however it was pretty sketchy at times with myself as the derv putting prot spirit on those that needed it and occasionally rebirthing Gwen so that she could fastcast Flesh of my flesh party members back up as they fall.

Spacing was really important. We put half the party on one side of the boss and half on the other with a monk on each side. As long as everyone stayed in the center we managed to avoid more than one or sometimes two party members dying at a time. Took several minutes but we eventually wore the boss down.

Sorry for the lack of information, but I figured I'd pipe in with at least a word of hope?

Just completed NM, with a PUG from Doomlore. I ran as a degen Necro (4 hexes for -10 degen) with some vamps. We had a dervish running Melandru, a R/Rt, 2 monks, a sin, and not even sure what else. There was minimal communication aside from the rare target call. We finished in (i believe) just about 2 hours, and without a party wipe at Ilsunder (though there had been one or two earlier). At the very end, someone(s) popped an Armor of Salvation, 2 Honeycombs and a Grail of Might. It took several minutes and a couple near wipes, but we killed him with out terrible difficulty. His health did seem to stop dropping periodically, and at the very end it looked like he might wipe us with no visible health, but enough people managed to get up and smack him around a little more and we made it. (golds all around except 1 diamond)

I wish I could be more helpful, but I hadn't realized so many people were having so much trouble or I'd have been more attentive.

For those having trouble with the end boss, I easily pulled him towards the resurrection shrine. We pulled him past the little flame geyser so you can probably trap him right there and watch as he dies. Pulling greatly helps with those little fireballs rolling around.

Just because I am a masochist (what other reason could there be? ), I have been playing around with this dungeon in Normal Mode using various hero/hench combinations. So far the only team configurations I have gotten to work successfully have involved using Great Dwarf Weapon and spamming it relentlessly on my melee heroes/henches to keep Ilsunder, the end boss, knocked down.

In other words Great Dwarf Weapon, plus the teams' own knockdown skills (e.g., Devona plus my warrior Heroes) is the only way I have found to defeat the end boss.

However, this just seems really cheesy to me. It seems like a boss ought to be hero/henchable in Normal Mode without resorting to PvE skills: Ursan, Pain Inverter, Great Dwarf Weapon, etc.

I am just curious if anyone has a Hero/Hench combination that works against this boss that (1) does not involve PvE skills and (2) would work with any Player class.

Maybe that's asking too much. Heh. But this is the ONLY dungeon (excluding Slavers) that I have not been able to complete (always because of the boss -- the rest of the dungeon is fine) using regular in-game skills and an all hero/hench team.

Because of the end boss, Catacombs is much harder than any of the Master's Difficulty dungeons (Rragar's, Shards, and Frostmaw) and that just seems unbalanced to me. Of course, this may be because this end boss is particularly "Hero/hench-team unfriendly": Fire Bombs and giant rolling Fireballs. I mean, come on.

So, my question is: how would you defeat Ilsunder using Hero/henches and no PvE skills with a team configuration that would work with any class player: warrior, monk, mesmer, etc.?

Trivially easy You need:

4 ranged attackers (set on 'attack')
4 support characters (set on 'avoid fight')

If you're yourself a monk or melee character, you're one of the support characters, otherwise you're one of the ranged attackers.

There are no specific requirements for the ranged attackers except the ability to do damage. All the support characters are Mo/X or X/Mo and bring Vengeance.

One of the ranged attackers aggroes Ilsundur to spawn the flaming balls and lets Ilsundur kill him at the spot. Other ranged attackers run into the balls and die as well. The support characters move to a spot which is about 1.5 aggro ranges away from Ilsundur and not on the path of either ball. The support characters resurrect the attackers at 8 second intervals, and the attackers move between the support characters and Ilsundur and attack. Repeat until Ilsundur dies. If one of the support characters is a MM, he can raise an unending stream of minions as well.

This works because Vengeance resurrects a player at full health and energy for 30 seconds, the recharge of the skill is likewise 30 seconds so you can have a constant duty cycle, dying won't add any DP, and on top of that the resurrected players will have a +25% damage bonus.

This method has been tested to be failsafe in NM and HM alike

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Yes, if you're doing it with H+H then you and your heroes must be the support team, and that restricts the party composition a fair amount since henches are not particularly good in offensive roles and thus the rest of the dungeon will be that much harder. Furthermore, it is not advisable to use AoE against Ilsundur because he will move and possibly aggro the support team. Having 2 real players with heroes is a considerably better option, if available.

In any case, Ilsundur has closer to 40k health in HM so it takes a while to gnaw that away with any method.

Any idea how to H+H in HM? Having difficultly in finding grp for it.

Scroll back in this thread for the multi-warrior / great dwarf weapon spam team. Worked for me, although you might want to take some canes or something to help out at the rest of the dungeon. Ilsundur himself was a pushover.

I did this dungeon last night with hero+hench. I used 3 PvE skills, but only 2 of them in the fight against the boss, and one of those was used minimally, and did little. I was R/Mo with Rebirth, PvE skills were LoD, Pain Inverter (which didn't do much), and "I Am The Strongest!".

Took the following hero+hench team:

Dunkoro = HB healer
Norgu = Migrain
Gwen = Hex Eater Vortex
Lina
Eve
Herta
Zho

I was a Broadhead Arrow build, so we had lots of interrupts. The boss wiped me once, and the fire balls wiped my team 2 times. I had more trouble getting to the boss than I did beating the boss. I used 2 Powerstones, 1 Armor, and 2 Essences.

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This dungeon just really stresses different skills. Where most of the rest of the game running X overpowering build will allow you to steamroll anything, in here you have to watch your positioning a lot more unless you take 100% shutdown of some kind.

For Ilsundur himself if you have very good flagging/micro, the only real problem is firebomb, since melee henchies will stupidly run back to the group and nuke the whole thing, so if the boss follows up with another aoe spike you go down fast. Otherwise he doesn't have that much more damage then other nuke bosses, just have to remember to avoid the balls of fire.

[skill]Dragon Slash[/skill] + Brawling Headbutt + [skill]Steelfang Slash[/skill]

Kept him knocklocked the whole time (though this was with Alliance members), I think we had a couple deaths due to not watching the balls.

I also used knock lock against the Flame Djinn, I had agroed it w/o my teammates explaining to me that we should body block it, so I just knocked it down over and over instead :P

This was in HM

And are end-bosses immune to Daze?

Interesting posts...I play a primary monk & usually H+H as the pugs looking for a monk is not doing catacombs. *cough* temple *cough* I run a signet smiter (bane, castaigon & SOJ) with breath, RoD, imp summom, banish & PI.

Any suggestions for my prof as the suggestions r usually for rangers, necs & eles. help appreciated.

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