Is this somebody's idea of a joke?

I'm sent off on what I understand to be a Tribunal MQ section to deal with this Gedna Relvel Lich thing next to the Temple Gardens. So I smite all its minions and approach it with my usual confidence. You understand I am armed with Sunder and Terminus Electra, my daedric dai-katana fortified to the hilt with shock weakness and damage, and I am protected with 40% reflection and about 50-70% absorbtion. Those who have had experience of this lich will not be surprised to learn that said confidence was rapidly shattered when it became clear that the 5 or 6 good hits I could get in on the thing before it fried me had no decernable effect on it at all.

So I reasoned it must have some sort of protection from my weapons - all I had to do was try out a variety of debuffs, offensive spells, weapons etc to find its achilles heal combo. I thought. Some hours later, after several shopping expeditions and returns to my stronghold to rummage through my shelves and boxes I had exhausted every possible combination I could think of. The only thing that seemed to have any effect on it at all was hit and run tactics using stealth + chameleon whith which I managed to open what looked like a tiny, tiny gap on its health bar. Magic appeared to have no effect on it at all. It appeared to able to kill me with two shots of whatever spell it was throwing at me, so I had a max of about 10 casts and I was dead.

So I conceded defeat and looked up the wikki to find out what this thing was and I discover that, since I am lvl 47, it has 5400 HP, a magicka pool of 15100, magic resitance 600%, and it regenerates HP. It has only 50% shock resistance and its only weakness seems to be fire (which I don't happen to be able to deliver in any quantity). Its death ray offence spell is 100-200 each poison, fire and frost, so my assessment of two strikes and I'm out is borne out. Since I play on +100 difficulty I imagine some of these figures are altered somewhat, and not in a good way.

Armed with this information I decided to take a more cautious approach. It clearly did not like stealth and would tend to run away and hide if hit under chameleon. On one occasion it hid between two pillars and it couldn't get out, nor could it cast any magic for some reason, so I spent several minutes bashing it untill both my weapons weere nearly broken. With Sunder's last gasp the damn thing croaked - and promtply fell through the wall so I couldn't loot it.

Try again, i thought, I've got you now you blighter. Oh no. No, no, no. That must have been a glitch. Next time i cornered it it wasted no time in wasting me. I ran through my entire resources in stealth, magic protection, and healing (shed load of health potions) hitting it, running away, hitting it again but by the time I had run out of everything I had managed to reduce its health bar by maybe 10-15% before it fried me with about four interim reloads. That was my best shot. Lame or what.

Considering my options, I concluded the only way I might be able to beat this lich would be to slog back to balmora and enchant a battery of high end fire based weaponry and fire breathing trinkets - plus maybe go out hunting for some more stuff to pay for it all. Great. I considered some of the other battlres I had encountered that compared to this - there are not many, but the one that came to mind was the final battle with John Irenecus in Baldur's Gate 2 Tactics mod. That was hard, took me all weekend.

But the difference is that was an interesting battle and you had a party of six to wage it, so really you should have all bases covered, and I had. This was not an interesting battle and with a single character you can't have every base covered. 5000 odd HP and regenerating? The hell with that, it's rediculous. So I cracked and changed the diff slider to -100. Well, it made a massive difference, but what ensued was an epic battle over about 20 mins in one take. The blighter is dead, or whatever the lich thing equivelent is.

Anyway I would be interested to hear of anyone who has managed to beat this lich thing fair and square on +100 diff and how they managed it.