You know, I actually sat down with a pug one day and decided to do this.
It’s honestly not that bad of a fight. More than anything it seems like some decent fight dynamics are getting drowned in a sea of unintuitive confusion by the use of recycled animation and a lack of consistent visual language throughout the dungeon that associates somebody being hit with the consequence of something spawning.
Like you, we couldn’t get that reflection trick to work, because like most forum suggestions it’s pretty high risk/high reward. So we ended up treating it like Subject Alpha. Save your dodges for the right hand’s green liquid attack, and you’ll always have enough endurance to dodge twice in a row, which is long enough to effectively negate the spiders spawning.
More specifically;
The Left hand striking the floor causes spiked vines to pop up from the floor under each party member*. The Right hand striking the floor causes green balls of liquid to rain down from the ceiling and spawn spiders for however many hits it lands on your party. The cue for when you have to dodge exactly is subtle; both attacks cause the nightmare tree to shake like a dog drying off, but the Lefthanded attack will cause it to shake and then continue on to shake more vigorously. The vigorous shaking is specifically when the green liquid will appear, and when you need to dodge back-to-back.
We managed this fight by assigning a couple people to spider duty, to handle some adds that will spawn and aggro anyone within attacking range and any oopsie green liquid spiders you might get. We had the rest range it at 1200, and had them dodge to the left and right instead of back to avoid resetting the boss. If you put your mind to it you could probably come up with a melee-based alternative, but that’s just what worked for a pug.
*This is speaking from the viewer’s sense of left and right, and not the mob’s sense of left and right.
