Originally Posted by dansamy

end-game area.

Originally Posted by Kashrlyyk

The character, with which I first visited the underworld, had at least a AL of 30!

The Minotaurus used Sever Artery and dealt 519 damage! How is that possible?

Sever Artery doesn´t grant bonus damage.

Originally Posted by Fire Childe

armour isnt really that big a deal in underworld. certainly its secondary to damage limitation.

we have run groups where the tank was a smite monk. with protective bond/ essense bond/blessed signet/life bond/heal seed you can really kill an aatxes rate of damage. alternatively you could drop protective bond and get a ranger with symbiosis to reduce dmg taken as a percentage of your total hp. since you have so much, you could take about 10 straight hits with no other damage limitation and no healing. pile on balth aura/zealots fire/heal seed and spam divine boon till the cows come home. you now have an effective tank that will barely take any damage, has 1500hp and damages all enemies in an area around him.

very few enemies in underworld strip enchantments. i think only the behemoths with nature's renewel and they are not hard at all.

or hey. lets go one step further and show that level, hit points and armour dont mean jack if you use your brain and play to the weaknesses of the enemies you face.

you could put 4 superior runes on your lvl 12 warrior tank for a total penalty of 300hp.

do whatever it takes to get his hp after runes as low as possible. death penalty. weapon mods that have negative health. whatever. just get it as low as you can. 10 or 20hp total is ideal.

cast protective spirit on him to reduce all damage taken to 10% of his hp - i.e. at 20 hp that would be 2 dmg per hit.

then stick mending on him. you now have a pretty much invincible tank as long as protective spirit holds and you maintain mending. because you reduce damage taken to the point where it can he regenerated faster using health regen spells. healing breeze would also work like a charm but you need to keep recasting it. obviously.

ideally you would want as little hp as possible. 10hp would be be awesome. you take 1dmg per hit and mending will cover that you can tank for as long as your team can keep casting breeze and spirit. any healing spell even at 0 healing prayers would heal you back up to full health. so you could max out protection prayers and get the longest possible duration out of spirit.

to a point lower level characters would be better for this. you could have have a whole team of protected lowbie casters, with max protection prays and maxed out direct damage. all maintain mending on each other. then just brawl underworld. of course, the downside to this is that, if protective spirit fails or is removed, just sneezing on your tank will kill him instantly. about 200 times over. lucky its underworld then because hardly anything packs enchant removal and the ones that do aint smart about it.

aatxes are level 29 and can hit harder to make up for the fact that AI and creature attack patterns will always be predictable and consistant.

this is just to make underworld even remotely challenging.

i would personally like to see underworld get alot harder. have creatures run out of area of effect dmg spells and have them strip enchants more often.

Originally Posted by Fire Childe

soon there will be people in LA going:

WTB: GODLY GOD AXE. MUST HAVE -20 HP OR MORE. WILL PAY IN $$CHEESE$$

Originally Posted by Studio Ghibli

No problem.

I miss the old-tyme loot of UW and FoW. I miss old-tyme loot, period.

At the moment, xp aside, there doesn't feel like much of a reason to head into those two areas, unless you want to grind ('cause, with how loot drops have become, that's what it is) for a glowing bow or something.

If you like glittering dust, there's plenty of that there.

- edit -

And to head the OP off at the pass, as far as damage mechanics go, since none of us will ever make it past level 20, none of us know how attribute point / damage progression occurs post 20.

We do now, however, prior to level 20, attribute points scale positively with level.

That is, as level goes up, amount of attribute points awarded goes up.

Damage, too, does the same thing.

So, no, it isn't cheating.

Maybe Mr. Aataxe, unlike other mobs his level, has a particular specialization in certain attribute areas, along with a real nice weapon.

Maybe, because he's an UW mob, he has a special "While in Underworld recieve X damage bonus!" Which, again, is completely legitimate. I know players have variants of that. "If fighting X," "If enchanted, deal X more."

So, in conclusion, see my original post in this thread.

Originally Posted by Studio Ghibli

.. that's a swell idea.

Originally Posted by KitiaraBlueLady

I didn't find UW to be very challenging. You just have to communicate with your team and make sure they are all on the same page.

If you follow this strategy you should have no problem:

2-3 warrirors on the stairs spread out in a line, awaiting the ataxes. Then you have a Ranger with a good long range bow aggro the ataxes and bring them to the awaiting warriors on the stairs. As soon as you see the ataxes get close, your monks or whoever has some good protection buffs should lay them down on the warriors. The stairs are narrow enough so that if the warriors strike the oncoming ataxes they will bottleneck them, preventing them from reaching your more vulnerable teammates. Once you are through with the stairs, further on you will find several other very narrow places where you can repeat this tactic. I'm sure the Guild Wars designers put these bottlenecks in for a reason! (wink!)

Hope this helps.