Mallyx

[WarBlade]

I'll be working.

[MrBozack]

I'd love to finally meet Mallyx. You know he'll like me the most, so perhaps I can hide at the back somewhere.

[WarBlade]

Ummm... With Mallyx there is no back. He shadow steps you to his location so all units can expect to be in melee range.

[Sylva Firewind]

alas still short a pre-req for this

[FoxBat]

This sucker went down nice and easy. With the para/rit updates (mostly rit), he gave us far less trouble than the minions on the way - zero deaths. Anticlimactic really...

I recommend tackling this in smaller groups with heroes than trying to drag everyone together, it's just easier to do. The only human that really helps is a paragon, although I think you could manage without that even.... most of the time mallyx was KD'd or swinging uselessly at our spirit masses.

[Zed-F]

Alright, so what's the overall build then? The key skills that are needed to make it work? Signet of Binding and Great Dwarf Weapon? Wanderlust?

And, who's up for another go? I still have 3 characters who are in position to do this, IIRC.

[WarBlade]

Me.

[FoxBat]

This is what we ran. Not everything we brought there was useful or optimal, but it did the job.

Earthbind lets anything knock the guy down for a good time, although in theory stonefist insignias should do the same. So dragonslash->headbutt spam could be fairly strong. GDW was great damage and about as much KD as you could hope for maintained on 4 guys. Still sometimes I screwed up and didn't maintain it properly, so it isn't essential, but it is quite awesome.

The listed spirit spam build has some energy issues and requires micro, a better one can probably be made. But the one we had kept the defensive skills up throughout the fight, and the cast times are fast enough that summon-interrupts were rarely an issue. If we don't have the paragon SY+blockwebs to fall back on, I think you can manage just with the spirits, but in that case I'd rather give the job to a human that will more reliably play it right.

The extra dummy offense spirits were pretty imporant, as was our hero's penchant for setting them up in his face. When he does a summon and you all run away, he can easily get bodyblocked by the spirits, or spend a few hits knocking them down, only for the signet to get reused quickly again.

We also had an oni summon who was mysteriously useful. He was healing mallyx with hexes/conditions but it hardly seemed to matter, we could easily damage past it. A single shadowsong might be good, keeping him blind half the time and stuck uselessly self-removing the condition (and not attacking) the other half. On a melee bar you might even tack on sneak attack to keep him blinded longer.

[Zed-F]

I'm wondering if we can take control of Mallyx's area spirits with sig of binding and turn them against him. Might be worth a shot.

[FoxBat]

Fairly sure that won't work, it was fixed in slavers with a note like "not the minion of a foe" - implying that the skill now requires targeted spirits to have a controller. The portal spirits, duncan's and mallyx's are not created by summoning skills and thus don't belong to them.