Secret Lair of the Snowmen HM Discussion

So I've only really been looking into this place in the last few days but obviosuly it's the fastest way to attain rep for your Delver Title.

This thread is mainly for sharing ideas, build and different strategies to save time and speed up the run.

At the moment the rn is taking me anywhere between 13-16 minutes in Hard Mode and I'm using the following builds:

WARNING: These builds are high in gimmick factor, but they are designed to clear this area as fast as possible with as little hassle as possible.

Me:

N/Rt

12 Soul Reaping 12 Communing

[skill]Defiant Was Xinrae[/skill][skill]Union[/skill][skill]Signet of Lost Souls[/skill][skill]Death Pact Signet[/skill] + utility x 4

Heroes:

E/R

12+2+1 Fire 10+1 E-Storage 8 Beast Mastery

[skill]Searing Heat[/skill][skill]Teinai's Heat[/skill][skill]Liquid Flame[/skill][skill]Rodgort's Invocation[/skill][skill]Meteor[/skill][skill]Elemental Attunement[/skill][skill]Fire Attunement[/skill][skill]Edge Of Extinction[/skill]

12+2+1 Fire 10+1 E-Storage 8 Prot

E/Mo
[skill]Searing Heat[/skill][skill]Teinai's Heat[/skill][skill]Liquid Flame[/skill][skill]Rodgort's Invocation[/skill][skill]Elemental Attunement[/skill][skill]Fire Attunement[/skill][skill]Life Bond[/skill][skill]Balthazar's Spirit[/skill]

12+3+1 Death 10+1 Soul Reaping 8 Prot

N/Mo
[skill]Jagged Bones[/skill][skill]Animate Bone Minions[/skill][skill]Death Nova[/skill][skill]Blood of the Master[/skill][skill]dismiss condition[/skill][skill]Protective Spirit[/skill][skill]Aegis[/skill][skill]Signet of Lost Souls[/skill]

Usage is fairly Straight forward. After Life bond is cast on me and Balthazar's on the bonder hero, I'm the first in after casting my ashes, to disable all spells, then my heroes nuke the hell outta the cave. Disable EoE on the ele, and lay it manually so the when one group of Snowmen die, they all fall
All the AoE is there to esure that all Snowmen are below 90% hp to trigger EoE, and also just because the EoE owns.

For hench, I usually take both eles and both monk. More EoE + heals


I will update with suggestions and bars, and I'm especially looking forward to hearing about advice on my utility slots. Thanks in advance, Everlong.

Looks very nice.

Just from looking at it though, I have to ask why Firestorm? It's known that this causes a lot of scatter in the enemies, making it hard for your other AoE's to take effect.

Maybe replace it with [skill]Liquid Flame[/skill]?

Yeah I've been looking to replace Firestorm, I'll sub it in and tell you how it goes. Besides, Snowmen always cast or attack so it'll trigger the AoE damage.

Snowman do very little damage on auto attacks. You can dump Life Bond and all of that stuff.

Make the MM Order of Undeath with Bone Fiends. The current build relies on minions dying in order to get damage, which means (1) the snowman are killing stuff, which won't be happening since they hit 1-5 damage with auto attacks, or (2) the hero is making more minions, which won't happen until something dies, and by that time it's likely most of the group is dead.

IMO just run dual SF on your eles, for pure damage on a hero E that still wins. You don't really need utility or anything else here.

Drop Soul Reaping a bit and get Channeling up; then take Splinter Weapon and the Barrage henchman.

To clarify, the Life Bond is there, because when 20 snowmen spike you with 50 dmg snowballs, you get screwed over. Life Bond and Defiant Was Xinrae help a lot here. And I'll try the MM, but SF hasn't been worth running since they upped the energy so much imo.

No, not Life Bond, use SoA. Run in to a mob ahead of your party, so YOU get spiked. Manually trigger SoA off your monk bar. Win.

Snowball is a spell, Life Bond only works on attacks...

Honestly, my gal and I cleared it pretty darn quick the other day with my Assassin, HB/HP Monk, SS and MM Necros (similar to yours) and her running Splinter/Barrage plus N/Rt healer and two fire Eles. Pretty straight forward. SS and Splinter/Barrage do crazy damage, and for "tanking" (used quite loosely in here) I used nothing more than Critical Defenses + Critical Agility to ward off the first load of hits from big mobs. For even more whole-mob damage I used Moebius + Death Blossom.

That build clears the mobs like crazy.

yeah i'd like to be able to run all those builds, but obviously im stuck with the 3 heroes i'm allowed. I'll look into the damage removal from Life Bond, I hadn't considered it really.

Do the snowman leave corpses ?

Quote:

I just run Sab's with me splinter barraging. Mind-numbingly boring getting to R10, but vaguely worth the effort ^^

What i used to max my delver title (which i did) was my ranger with buning arrow (but i reccomed incendiary arrows as an elite) also just add in a monk hero a SF nuker a discord hero and some henchies and did the dungeon a few times

I use three Searing Flames Elementalists:

[build prof=eleme/ firema=12+1+3 energy=12+1][Searing Flames][Glowing Gaze][Liquid Flame][Optional][Optional][Optional][Glyph of Lesser Energy][Fire Attunement][/build]

Takes me about 10 to 15 minutes.

jagged bones is pointless, use aura of the lich and micro it to make massive armies at once

im using 3x n/e with sf and other fire spells+ some caster hench, catching first agro myself with Defiant Was Xinrae and soa

works for me!