Help help! I'm being oppressed! See the violence inherent in the system!

[Silent Singer]

Ok mighty warriors, I am in dire need of advice.

I've tried to solo the Belfrey Dragon in Shadowguard every way I can. For reference, I have a combination of the following skills available on Zatoichi or his stones:

120 swords, tactics, chiv, bushido,healing, parry
110 anat, resist spells
100 necro, lumberjacking

I made a 100% cold dbl axe w/ max imbuable DI, HLL, HML, HLA, and Dragon Slayer, slapped on bushido, and can get maybe 5% of his life before he kills me.

I made a 70% cold longsword ( best I could do after using up three hammers ) with same setup as axe ( HLA only 32% due to lower imbue cap ) for AI and same story. I can basically one shot the drakes with it, but even using lvl 2 onslaught, the Dragon gets me.

Please share your tactics / set up you use to solo this guy. Thanks so much!

 

[BeaIank]

I will give it a shot tonight, most likely, but it pretty much being a paragon greater dragon from what I have read, I would recommend trying to joust him in the limited space you have instead of staying in front of him in the kill zone.
Confidence mini heals might also help with your survivability till you get to slow him down.

 

[Lord GOD(GOD)]

The only way I've done it on a dexxer is having someone take aggro from below while my Wraith AI spams him until he shoves me off the ledge and that was Discorded, plus everytime he pushes you back you lose target so you have to try to hit attack last and Amore Ignore at the same time.

Tbh I'm utterly sick of the Shadowguard encounter already. Anything that forces you to group or play 1-2 specific templates to get it done irritates me. The broken game mechanics in the final have caused that to fail 3x now too.

 

[Silent Singer]

Thanks for the input. Please let me know your results Zath. I also used a GD, hid my tamer on the ledge, every time he got pushed off I would quickly log out then back in, he'd appear with me and I'd re attack. My Dragon is a BEAST. 4.6 rating, 991 hp, crazy high resists, and in 30 minutes this method got him to about 5% or less health, but then I ran out of time. I was so frustrated I rage quit.

 

[jjcappe]

I've been running it with two accounts, 4x120 bard and a sampire.

Bard discos and runs the peacemaking mastery. Then use 100% poison daisho for feint and double strike.

Haven't tried without the bard, but it may still be doable.

 

[BeaIank]

I have tried it solo and with a 4x120 real skill bard. How the heck did you disco him?
I kept getting the message that my skill wasn't up to the task.

This will be extremely irritating to do at 250+ ping. Things go south quickly when he starts to push you down. Maybe if I can disco him, I can do it.

Edit: Going to try it again tomorrow, disco or not. I couldn't hit him consistently when he was trying to push me out of the ledge, so I will just cut the middle man and drop from the ledge myself when he does that to save me time.

 

[Logrus]

Having any bard mastery gives you a 5% bonus to disco. (Having disco mastery gives you 10%).
If you are having trouble getting disco on a mob, use despair on them and try again while despair is active. (Despair drops strength quite a bit so you can use that to lower the barding difficulty calculation.)
you can then switch back to another mastery once they are discorded.
I think exceptional instruments also give you a bonus.

 

[BeaIank]

I am going to try using Despair on him first. My bard has all three masteries and yet she kept getting the message that she had no chance to disco or peace the dragon.
I will also bring my other 4x120 bard to run provo masteries as well and see if things go better that way.

He dropped to 40% pretty quickly, but after that he kept healing himself and my ping screwed me pretty badly when he started to try to push me out of the roof.
As I said, I will also just drop myself when he starts trying to push me down to speed things up.

 

[Silent Singer]

You guys are not giving me confidence that I'm going to knock this one out on my own

 

[BeaIank]

It will likely be easier to do this on an actual sampire, and with better weapons. I realized right now that your weapon has no hit stamina leech, and I remembered that the reptile slayer on my macer lacks it too.
Going to imbue a new one to try again tonight.

On a random note, stagger helped a fair bit at the start of the fight. It slowed him down tremendously.

 

[Silent Singer]

Stagger sounds awesome, but I don't have a macer. I've wanted to create one but since I JUST got swords to 120, training another weapon skill is very unappealing atm.

 

[Silent Singer]

Well, tried to take my bard and run peace mastery on my 2nd acct while dancing around Dragon with armor ignore swings. I'd hit him for 177 a pop, retreat a few steps, try again. This worked for maybe 2 minutes. Death.......ah!

I see people talking in other forums about doing this whole encounter 12 and 14 times already. I'm very discouraged. I don't mind it being hard, but I'm running an expensive suit with 120 skills and making 0 headway. I'd at least like to pretend I had some chance, but so far it isn't even close.

 

[Lord GOD(GOD)]

I've managed to get it done twice, out of a lot of attempts, it's really irritating, so by that measure alone I suppose it fits in with most of the other rewards systems in UO.

 

[NuSair]

If it is really just a reskinned paragon greater dragon, I've solo'ed them using my fencing sampire w/120 parry and 45 DCI, using a weapon with HLA.

I basically keep feint or evasion up at all times, very similar to Rikktor. And even then, there are times I seem to get killed on one hit.

 

[NuSair]

If it is really just a reskinned paragon greater dragon, I've solo'ed them using my fencing sampire w/120 parry and 45 DCI, using a weapon with HLA.

I basically keep feint or evasion up at all times, very similar to Rikktor. And even then, there are times I seem to get killed on one hit.

 

[BeaIank]

Managed to kill him today, on the second try.
I could disco him this time, but bloody heck, is this encounter annoying.

The floor decoration makes it very sluggish to fight there with a high ping (I run 250 ms ping on average, being closer to Antarctica than to Legends' servers), the room takes about a minute to load when I start the encounter here. three times in a row the drake with the feather spawned on top of the roof, along with Belfry, so I had to wait till I could ring the bell and hope it wouldn't spawn over there AGAIN, and every time I got him down to 24%, he seemed to become nigh impossible to hit.
Also, thanks for the very sluggish setup of the room, the fight becomes extremely annoying when he is pushing you around, making it very difficult to hit him.

@Kyronix, this encounter needs some serious optimization and tweaking. Doing it with high ping is annoying as heck.

 

[Silent Singer]

Did you use mace or swords?

 

[BeaIank]

I used mace. Level 3 stagger helped a lot slow the dragon down at the start of the fight.
I also used a hammer pick for AI and mortal to try to stop him from healing when he gets low on health.
Took me 25 minutes to kill the bloody thing in the second try.

 

[Silent Singer]

Well I'm shelving this project for the moment. I have no interest in starting macing, imbueing the right weapon, and spending the time on this just for one boss. My frustration level is high after the Legends event last night where the creatures all took forever to kill (which was great) and then the boss died in less than ten seconds. So after an hour long event I didn't even get to SEE the final bad guy, much less hurt it. And this Dragon isn't even the boss of shadowguard but the temps that seem able to handle it are very limited.

 

[BeaIank]

I don't think macing is mandatory to do this.
It is likely just as doable to do it with swords or with fencing. The main problem is keeping jousting and hitting the bloody thing without falling from the roof. And trying to keep mortal on once he is low on health.
Also, keep someone to rez you around so you don't fail the encounter if you die.