Dhuum Heroway [theorycraft]

Have you figured out what happens to heroes if they die while fighting Dhuum?

As I understand it, players are turned into spirits and transported to Vale... they talk to the Mayor to return to the fight. But if heroes go back to the Vale, they can't talk to the Mayor and they're permanently gone. This could be disastrous.

If they don't go back to Vale (just drop down dead), then I guess you'll need to bring rez scrolls or UA (pre-cast before facing Dhuum) to bring them back?

Me and a friend just beat Dhuum with heroes.
Here are some screens:




The builds probably aren't optimal (too much SS etc.) and the run took ages (about 4 1/2 hours), but it wasn't bad considering it was our first UW fullrun.
We used a total of 2 consets (could easily be done with just 1, but we didn't know Dhuum was so easy). You basically need a conset (or at least an essence) to do the 4 riders since you have to keep up spellbreaker constantly. The rest is a cakewalk, especially if you do the Ice Wastes, Chaos Planes and Bone Pits quests in succession with a conset.

Dhuum was basically a snorefest with this build as I only had to spam Great Dwarf Weapon while the warrior and Dunkoro did the rest of the job.

As for the thread starter, I'd suggest you to take at least a tank (a permasin maybe, especially if it has some form of self heal) because it makes those dreadful quests like 4 riders easy. Also, for Dhuum I'd take some mesmer interrupts (leech sig, pdrain) on the heroes because that way you'll never even see your health bars drop.

Heroes will automatically turn into the spirit version on death and teleport back to dhuum. So you can kill a hero and micro their ghost skills to spam dhuum's rest. Surprisingly a.net didn't screw over players who were gonna use heroes.

Interesting builds there, I may have to try heroway now since every PuG group I get into fails somewhere throughout the run.

nice to see it done with heroway. 4.5 hours is a bit much, but still respectable to be able to say you can.

gj!

A few friends and I have been developing a team build with some heroes for UW, and it hasn't been totally successful yet, so I won't bother posting the templates as they are at the moment.

I will just share some random priorities, ideas, etc. we've tossed around talking about Dhuum. First and foremost, as you've captured in each revision of your team, Spirits are going to be pretty key to the clear. They provide a slightly haphazard offense (it's powerful with Painful Bond, just a little erratic due to targeting mechanics), a wall of bodies, defense (talking about Communing), and they offer a character slot that can be used, at least in part, for utility.

Naturally, like every other UW theorycrafter, we're collectively petrified of 4 Horsemen. After the instinctive dread dissipates a little, we start thinking like you thought - I also think that a bunch of Armor-of-Unfeeling'd spirits will be able to retard the onslaught of at least two of the Dhuum Bros, especially if you dispatch a monk or something to keep the spirits from getting mercilessly squished. Our other idea was just to play it off the Reaper, employing an ER ele to superspam prots and Infuse on him. Does he have enough health for this to work? Because frankly, I think we can nuke one side really quickly, so maybe we could just force him to survive a double-sided attack for a little bit and clear one side at a time.

Lastly comes the fight with Dhuum. I think this really won't be a tremendous deal, just an arduous one with a couple really important focal points: Reaper maintenance and good ol' fashioned efficiency. It's obvious that the Reapers need to stay alive, which is no big deal - prot the ones that are going to get hit, heal, continue. Spam Heal Party and stuff for his AoE "attack". Remember how to monk. More importantly regarding time, the damaging bits of the party need to be aware and attack proactively - frontliners just need to be quick so that they can deal as much damage as is physically possible, and any offensive spirit users need to bring their spirits around to where Dhuum decides to pop up. Watching a couple videos of Dhuum battles that took under 25 minutes, I noticed how fast they were getting in a groove of dealing damage to Dhuum the second he appeared, and that paid off when his Rest bar filled up and they had to finally take him down.

Last but not least, careful about DP on heroes - Tahlk's allergic to candy canes, and can't use them, so I've busted out my stacks of clovers from yesteryear for some party-wide DP relief.

/boring

well, its possible with heros in an acceptable time, me and a friend did uw with dhuum in 2:06, 1:43 for the normal quests


it looks very strange, but well, it worked

we used a conset for 4 horseman+icy wastes and aslo one for dhuum.

4 horseman:
first we placed the spirits on the west side, then we flagged the heros around the reaper, the players were on the east side but still in range of heros
i just made the thunderclap ele to take care about the west side and microed the meteor swarm.
we nearly died, but still did it.

more explanations can be found here, but just in german, because my english isnt that well (well, i think you already recognized it ^^)

Impressive

no problems with dhuum, most things got rupted and the damage was not that big because of SY! and conset
just his touch made us to use Pumpkin Cookies (around 45) and Honeycombs (around 12) but well, we didnt now that Heros will come as spirits so if you let some specific heros die, probably hero 1 and perhaps hero 2 and the N/Mo after u already got him near to death, his bar will fill more speedly, so you wont get that much touches, but not testet at the moment