Postscript :
Of
THREE (3) Level 100+ Hardcore characters, only
ONE (1) actually survived the Nightmare Baal fight. Which pretty much sums up how completely useless, unfair and "un-fun" this game is, in Hardcore.
Let's go over Nightmare Baal for a second :
(1) You can't bring minions (except a merc) into the battle with him, or he (as the notes say) starts to summon other boss monsters to run interference for him, making an already ridiculous fight, next to impossible. (I didn't even try this with my Necro, meaning that all the skill points that he devoted to this aspect of his build were basically wasted. He did bring his Iron Golem into the battle, which also had no effect as Baal teleports away much faster than the Golem can move or catch up to him.)
(2) Baal has this "Black Ring Of Death" attack that can one-shot a level 105 Necromancer with 4500+ hit points, a 40,000+ Defense Factor and 76+ across-the-board resists, while the character is on the
outer edge of the Black Ring Of Death (
not in the middle of it).
(3) If you attack in close, he uses the Black Ring Of Death against you, insta-kill. (Even while frantically chugging potions.)
(4) If you try to attack from range, he teleports on top of you and does some crazy kind of melee attack (it happens so fast that you can't even see the animation) that can 1-shot a Level 105 Paladin with 5500+ hit points, 77+ across-the-board resists and a 42,000 defense factor. You don't have time to drink a potion. Wham! Bang! Bam! You're Dead, Jim!
(5) Ranged, auto-targeting spells (e.g. Necro totems, Paladin Slayers, Trap Assassin traps) are next to useless against him as he teleports wildly all the time, meaning that if one of these spells gets a hit or two in on him (don't bet on it), he'll be gone before any more damage gets done to him.
(6) On average he kills your mercenary after about 8 to 12 seconds of battle (assuming, of course, that you have lived that long). Thereafter, whether or not you go back to town and trot your merc out into the wilderness to fight a few monsters and fix the "merc loses all his / her innate skills" bug that we all know about, it doesn't matter because subsequently, the merc gets 1-shotted instantly in every case. I am not sure if this is a bug or if it is intentional, but it makes mercenaries next to useless as well.
(7) Baal also has some kind of attack (I'm not sure exactly what it is, it's not his Frost Nova) that absolutely
cripples your ability to move (this effect is even worse if you are chugging potions, which you have to do to avoid being 1-shotted). I noticed that both my Paladin and Necro were slowed to a crawl, despite their both having FRW on their boots (the only reason this didn't affect the Assassin was because of Blink, but she came very close several times).
Of course, since you can't run away when Baal starts bombarding you with the Black Ring Of Death, you will sit there watching your life bulb being eroded rapidly and there is
nothing you can do to avoid this... and of course you are spending all your attention on staying alive; you don't dare actually take your attention off of healing so as to actually attack this monster.
(8) Of the 3 Level 104+ characters that I tried this quest with, the only one who survived was an Assassin whose Storm Crows do around 15-20K damage per shot (with some minuses to enemy poison resist). This character (I am sure of it, I counted) had to hit over 40 times with this attack, to finally kill him.
This means that either Nightmare Baal has around 700K+ hit points or has the equivalent in "Avoid". I think the only reasons that the Assassin lived (apart from her massive damage attack) were (a) Perfect Being and (b) Blink... but even
that fight was a very near thing.
The bottom line : This "mandatory" Median quest is next to
suicidal for most character classes, no matter
how well the character in question is played; and even for the "right" character builds (e.g. characters that have a massive damage homing attack that Baal can't just teleport away from), the slightest mis-step will result in the instant death of a character that has taken hours, days and weeks of careful play, just to get to this point. It is an utterly unsatisfying and pointless waste of time in Hardcore. I can understand why an end-game boss quest is supposed to be hard; but Median has taken this (defensible) idea and made a masochistic, unfair and really unenjoyable parody out of it.
So (you say), "just play Softcore". But there, the problem is reversed. If you don't mind getting killed, like, 20+ times, ANY build played however amateurishly, can easily succeed... "persistence pays off", in other words. The answer to all of this is (or should be), obvious : if you want to make these quests "hard enough" to be "challenging" for immortal game characters, then the mod designers need to tone them down drastically for non-mortal characters. (Or, just tone them down for ALL characters.)
I have repeatedly seen in the patch notes how one of the designers' claimed goals with Median XL Sigma, was to "make it easier for players to access and enjoy the end-game content". Well, I can tell you guys, when there is a 30% survival rate to get your fantasy characters (carefully designed and geared up over months of careful play) from the "Intermediate" difficulty level to the "Hard" difficulty level...
something is badly wrong,
somewhere.
It's a shame. Median is otherwise such a good game. But the Hardcore play balance is badly,
BADLY broken. It needs to be fixed.
) - they are very lagproof too - and then running your preferable spec or just some rando for which you got good gearing. Don't listen to random chaps from softcore who'll told you that summoners are boring - that's just depends on task, one click RMB spam on some other builds isn't any less boring, constant & precise bending/baning/distraction resummoning on necro is even more enjoyable.
