Help me spank the mindblades!

After hero & henching Tombs I decided to have a go at Underworld.
The rules are the same: no bonder, and preferrably no PvE skills or consumables, but as there are no henches it's only me and three heroes.

The team I've been using is me (warrior), hybrid monk, flashbot ele, curse necro.

I can do the five first quests just fine, and clear everything without much problem - but I hit a brick wall when I go up against the first group of nine Mindblade Spectres. Even though I flag back my squad they quickly e-drain my casters, stop the entire team from using signets, and then conjure phantasm + clumsiness the team to death.

Any tips on how to deal with them would be appreciated.

(I realize that they don't have enchant removal, so a bonder is an obvious solution, but I'd really not want to do that unless it's absolutely necessary.)

Or should I simply try to avoid killing any Banished Dream Riders?

Why would it be so difficult to use a bonder? >.>

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It's too much hexing, you can't remove it, just simply heal through it.
However, because you only have one monk, thats not an option. If you take too much hex removal, you'll be gimped for the rest of the UW.

No point in taking a bonder to the uw anyways dying nightmares will just make them useless and ineffective.

Make everything /me and take hex breaker?

In clearing most of UW and doing some of the quests with just myself and 3 heros. I used spellbreaker on monk as elite, its useful on yourself when gathering aggro - stops ms, and then for mindblades cast it on the monk hero for him, so he can still heal, if you give him arcane echo also, you can get 2 copies - one for him and one for you!

Yeah, I think Spellbreaker is key. Problem is that my monk uses Word of Healing as his only heal, so he has to choose between spellbreaker and WoH. That's probably what I'll end up doing, hopefully it's possible to make a healer that's efficient enough even without WoH.

I tried swapping him out for a restoration rit, but it turned out that without Offering of Spirit rits quickly run in to energy management problems. Also the healing really isn't as good as with a monk with WoH.

An alternative is Obsidian Flesh on the warrior. It's not nearly as good as Spellbreaker, as with Spellbreaker the enemies waste their spells, with Obsidian Flesh they just wait until it runs out. It'll give me 21 seconds to kill mindblades, but after that I'll have to run. It'd likely work, though without the support of the curse necro it'll likely take forever to clear the area.

Other possibilities are putting Spell Shield on the monk (requires reducing protection to increase divine favor; also not sure if hero AI realizes that it needs to keep reapplying Spell Shield), or Shadow Form (requires that I shadow step away from the mindblades when Shadow Form runs out)

@Jiggles: I considered hex breaker, but it only stops one hex before ending, and there's 9 mindblades in the group. It could still work to protect my warrior from Clumsiness if it didn't have a long recharge.

@Kurzick Eater: The mindblades are mesmers with power drain and power leak, any spell which takes more than a quarter second to cast will get interrupted. That's actually the reason I die, all the casters have had their energy stolen.


The problem is taking out the mindblades without becoming vulnerable to any of the other mobs instead. Dammit, if I could only bring one more hero it'd be a cakewalk.

Anyway, I'd like to thank everyone for the input, time to experiment and see what, if anything, works. If I can't get the above suggestions to work I guess I'll just have to put Life Bond and Mending on my monk after all.

I had gift of health and dismiss conditions to push the red bars up on my hero monk. I did also give at least one of my other heros a hex removal skill.

Did you consider Spell Shield on the monk? That+Dwayna's Kiss > Mindblades. You can also consider Spotless Mind, Holy Veil, Deny Hexes.

Get a barrager :P The mindblades shouldn't do so much damage that you can't round them up all by yourself and hit a corner so they can't come after your casters. After that, barrage away.

Well, I got past the Mindblades. It took forever, but eventually I had cleared them out.

And that's when I realized there's just no way in hell I'd be able to do the Four Horsemen quest. With just three heros I can't split, and I can't realistically hope to make a stand at the Reaper.

Oh well. At least I finished Clear the Chamber, Unwanted Guests, Escort of Souls, Wrathful Spirits, Demon Assassin, and I'm pretty sure I can do Terrorweb Queen and maybe Servants of Grenth and Imprisoned Spirits.

But Four Horsemen is just out of my league. Probably couldn't do it with just heroes even with consumables and a bonder.

Come on, Anet, give me just ONE more hero slot and I'll finish this!

Well, at least I got two ecto.